THE 

SUBTERRANEAN 
BROTHERHOOD 



"The Subterranean Brotherhood" is the ingenious title of Julian Haw- 
orne's book, in which he tells the story of his life in the Federal Prison 

Atlanta, Georgia, where he was sent for criminal misuse of the mails, 
calamity brought on him, as his friends know, by his over-trustfulness 
id the spirit of romance naturally inherent in a mind that comes by it as 
gitimately as does a son of Nathaniel. The book is written in a tense 
ssire to be just and not allow the rankling sense of injustice created by 
ic circumstances under which Hawthorne was convicted to get the bet- 
r of his judgment. This in itself is a study. I know that the book 
is already had several practical results in the conduct of the Atlanta 
rison. It will bring about more. (328 pages, price $1.25. Published by 
obert M. McBride & Co., 31 Union Square, North, New York.) 

:f " x, 



FOOTFALLS 

In the cell over mine at night 

A step goes to and fro 

From barred door to iron wall 

From wall to door I hear it go, 

Four paces, heavy and slow, 

In the heart of the sleeping jail: 

And the goad that drives, I know! 

I never saw his face or heard him speak; 
He may be Dutchman, Dago, Yankee, Greek; 
But the language of that prisoned step 
Too well I know! 

Unknown brother of the remorseless bars, 
Pent in your cage from earth and sky and stars, 
The hunger for lost life that goads you so, 
I also know! 

Hour by hour, in the cell overhead, 

Four footfalls, to and fro 

'Twixt iron wall and barred door 

Back and forth I hear them go 

Four footfalls come and go! 

I wake and listen in the night: 

Brother, I know! 

(Written in Atlanta Penitentiary, 
May, 1913.) 



THE 

SUBTERRANEAN 
BROTHERHOOD 



BY 

JULIAN HAWTHORNE 

AUTHOR OF "A FOOL OF NATURE," ETC. 



NEW YORK 

McBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY 
1914 



Copyright, 1914, by 
MCBRIDE, NAST & Co. 



Published September, 1914 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I INTRODUCTORY i 

II THE DEVIL'S ANTECHAMBER 13 

III THE ROAD TO OBLIVION 33 

IV INITIATION 52 

V ROUTINE 71 

VI SOME PRISON FRIENDS OF MINE 91 

VII THE MEN ABOVE in 

VIII FOR LIFE 130 

IX THE TOIL OF SLAVERY 149 

X OUR BROTHER'S KEEPER 170 

XI THE GRASP OF THE TENTACLES 193 

XII THE PRISON SILENCE 215 

XIII THE BANQUETS OF THE DAMNED 232 

XIV THE POLICY OF FALSEHOOD 254 

XV THE FRUIT OF PRISONS 275 

XVI IF NOT PRISONS WHAT? 295 

APPENDIX 315 



PREFACE 

These chapters were begun the day after I got 
back to New York from the Atlanta penitentiary, 
and went on from day to day to the end. I did 
not know, at the start, what the thing would be 
like at the finish, and I made small effort to make 
it look shapely and smooth; but the inward im- 
pulse in me to write it, somehow, was irresistible, 
in spite of the other impulse to go off somewhere 
and rest and forget it all. But I felt that if it were 
not done then it might never be done at all; and 
done it must be at any cost. I had promised my 
mates in prison that I would do it, and I was under 
no less an obligation, though an unspoken one, to 
give the public an opportunity to learn at first 
hand what prison life is, and means. I had my- 
self had no conception of the facts and their sig- 
nificance until I became myself a prisoner, though 
I had read as much in u prison literature " as most 
people, perhaps, and had for many years thought 
on the subject of penal imprisonment. Twenty 
odd years before, too, I had been struck by Wil- 
liam Stead's saying, " Until a man has been in 
jail, he doesn't know what human life means." 
But one does not pay that price for knowledge 
voluntarily, and I had not expected to have the 

vii 



viii Preface 

payment forced upon me. I imagined I could 
understand the feelings of a prisoner without 
being one. I was to live to acknowledge myself 
mistaken. And I conceive that other people are 
in the same deceived condition. So, with all the 
energy and goodwill of which I am capable, I set 
myself to do what I could to make them know the 
truth, and to ask themselves what should or could 
be done to end a situation so degrading to every 
one concerned in it, from one end of the line to 
the other. The situation, indeed, seems all but 
incredible. Your first thought on being told of it 
is, It must be an exaggeration or a fabrication. 
On the contrary, words cannot convey the whole 
horror and shamefulness of it. 

I am conscious of having left out a great 
deal of it. I found as I went on with this writ- 
ing that the things to be said were restricted to a 
few categories. First, the physical prison itself 
and the routine of life in it must be stated. That 
is the objective part. Then must be indicated the 
subjective conditions, those of the prisoner, and 
of his keepers what the effect of prison was 
upon them. Next was to come a presentation of 
the consequences, deductions and inferences sug- 
gested by these conditions. Finally, we would be 
confronted with the question, What is to be done 
about it? Such are the main heads of the theme. 

But I was tempted to run into detail. Here I 
will make a pertinent disclosure. During my im- 



Preface ix 

prisonment I was made the confidant of the life 
stories of many of my brethren in the cells. I am 
receiving through the mails, from day to day, up 
to the present time, other such tales from released 
convicts. The aim of them is not to get their 
tellers before the public and win personal sym- 
pathy, but to hold up my hands by supplying data 
chapter and verse in support of the asser- 
tions I have made. They do it abundantly; the 
stories bleed and groan before your eyes and ears, 
and smell to heaven; the bluntest, simplest, most 
formless stuff imaginable, but terrible in every 
fiber. Before I left prison I had accumulated a con- 
siderable number of these narratives, and had made 
many notes of things heard and seen data and 
memoranda which I designed to use in the already 
projected book which is now in your hands. Such 
material, however, would have been confiscated by 
the Warden had its existence been known, and 
none of it would have been permitted to get out- 
side the walls openly. The only thing to do, then, 
was to get it out secretly by the " underground 
railroad." 

There is an underground railroad in every pe- 
nal institution. There is one at Atlanta. I at- 
tempted to use it, but my freight got in the wrong 
car. A prisoner whom I knew well and trusted 
came to me, and said he had found a man who 
would undertake to pass the packet through the 
barriers; he had already served such a need, and 



x Preface 

was anxious to do it in my case. This man was 
also a prisoner of several years' standing, and with 
several years yet to serve ; he had recently applied 
for parole, but had been refused. I" met and 
talked with him, found him intelligent and cir- 
cumspect, and professedly eager to do his share 
toward helping me get my facts before the world. 
He intimated that he was on favorable terms with 
one of the guards or overseers who was inclined 
to help the prisoners, and would take the packet 
out in his pocket and mail it to its address. I ad- 
dressed it to a friend of mine living near New 
York and on a certain prearranged day I handed 
it to my confederate. He hid it inside his shirt, 
and that was the last I saw of it. 

The packet never turned up at its address, and 
it was only long after that I was told what had oc- 
curred. My confederate wanted his parole badly, 
and made a bargain with the Warden, by the terms 
of which his parole should be granted in return for 
his delivering to the Warden my bundle of memo- 
randa. The terms were fulfilled on both sides, 
and my data are at this moment in the Warden's 
safe, I suppose, along with the letter that I wrote 
during my confinement to the Editor of the New 
York Journal (mentioned in the text of this book) . 

The Warden thought, perhaps, that the lack of 
my accumulated data would prevent or embarrass 
me in writing my book. I thought so myself at 
first, but had not long been at work before I found 



Preface xi 

that the essential book needed no data other than 
those existing in my memory and supplied by the 
general theme; my material was not scant, but 
excessive. My knowledge of prison and my 
opinions and arguments based upon that knowl- 
edge were not subject to the Warden's confisca- 
tion, and they were quite enough to make a book 
of themselves, without need of dates, places, names 
and illustrations. Indeed, even of such supplemen- 
tary and confirmatory matter I also found an ade- 
quate amount in my own unaided recollection 
more than I cared to give space to ; for it was my 
belief that such things were not required to se- 
cure confidence in the truth of what I had to say in 
the minds of persons whose confidence was worth 
my winning. They would believe me because 
they couldn't help it because truth has a qual- 
ity which compels belief. Moreover, of illustra- 
tions of my statements the public had of late had 
more than enough from other sources; what was 
now wanted was not so much instances of the 
facts, as a general presentation of the subject into 
which special and apposite cases could be fitted by 
the reader according to his previously acquired 
information. Finally, I reflected that the intro- 
duction of names* places and dates might injure 
the men thus pointed out; secret service men, post- 
offlce inspectors and other spies, and the prison 
authorities themselves, would be prompted and 
helped to give them trouble. Accordingly, I was 



xii Preface 

sparing even of such data as I had; and I no- 
ticed, as the chapters appeared serially in the 
newspaper syndicate which published them, that 
they were criticised in certain quarters as of the 
" glittering generality " class of writings; I made 
assertions, but adduced no specific proof of them. 
The source of such criticisms was obvious enough, 
but they did no harm, and were not accom- 
panied by denials of my facts. The only other 
form of attack brought against the book is com- 
prised in the claim that I am a writer of fiction and 
as such incapable of telling the truth about any- 
thing; that I was the dupe of designing persons 
who made me the mouthpiece for their factitious 
grievances or spites; and that I was myself ani- 
mated by a spirit of revenge for the injury of my 
imprisonment, which must render anything I might 
allege against prisons and their conduct worthless. 
I have touched upon the two latter counts of the 
indictment in the text of the book; of the assertion 
that fiction writers cannot stick to facts or convey 
truth, I will say that it is unreasonable upon its 
face. Fiction writers, in order to attain any 
measure of success in their calling, must above 
all things base their structures upon facts, and 
to seek and promulgate unaeniable truth in 
their descriptions and analyses. The " fiction " 
part of their stories is the merest outside 
part; all within must be true, or it is noth- 
ing. A novelist or story writer, therefore, is 
more likely to give a true version of any event 



Preface xiii 

or condition he may be required to present, than a 
person trained in any other form of writing, with 
the exception, perhaps, of journalism. And I 
have been a journalist, as well as a story writer, 
for more than thirty years past, and what success 
I attained was due to the accuracy and veracity 
of the reports I sent to my papers. In short, I 
am a trained observer of facts if ever there were 
one; and no facts in my experience have been so 
thoroughly hammered into my mind, heart and 
soul, digested and appreciated, as were the facts 
of my prison life. Whatever else that I have 
written might be cavilled at on the plea of inac- 
curacy, certainly this book cannot be. Whether 
the statements which it contains be feebly or 
strongly put may properly be questioned, but none 
of them can be successfully denied. 

But this aspect of the matter gives me small un- 
easiness. The important consideration is, will 
the book, assuming that it is accepted as the truth, 
do the work, or any large part of the work, which 
it was designed to do ? Will readers be influenced 
by it to practical action ; will it be an effective ele- 
ment in the forces that are now rising up to make 
wickedness and corruption less than they are? 
The proposal toward which the book points and 
in which it ultimates is so radical and astounding 
nothing less than that Penal Imprisonment for 
Crime be Abolished that the author can hardly 
escape the apprehension that the mass of the public 



xiv Preface 

will dismiss it as preposterous and impossible. 
And yet nothing is more certain in my opinion than 
that penal imprisonment for crime must cease, and 
if it be not abolished by statute, it will be^by force. 
It must be abolished because, alarming or socially 
destructive though alternatives to it may appear, 
it is worse than any alternative, being not only 
dangerous, but wicked, and it breeds and multi- 
plies the evils it pretends to heal or diminish. It 
is far more wicked and dangerous than it was a 
thousand or a hundred years ago, because society 
is more enlightened than it was then, and the mul- 
titude now exercise power which was then confined 
to the few. Whatever person or society know- 
ingly and wilfully permits the existence of a 
wickedness which it might extirpate, makes itself 
a party thereto, and also inflames the wickedness 
itself. And the ignorance or the impotence which 
we could plead heretofore in history, we cannot 
plead to-day. We know, we have power, and we 
must act; if we shrink from acting, action will be 
taken against us by powers which cannot be esti- 
mated or controlled. This book is meant to con- 
firm our knowledge and to stimulate and direct, in 
a measure, our action; and to avert, if possible, the 
consequences of not acting. Its individual power 
may be slight; but it should be the resolve of every 
honest and courageous man and woman to add to 
it the weight of their own power. Wonderful 
things have been accomplished before now by 



Preface xv 

means which seemed, in their beginning, as inade- 
quate and weak as this. 

In the sixth chapter of the Book of Joshua you 
may read the great type and example of such 
achievements, the symbol of every victory of good 
over evil, the thing that could not be done by 
man's best power, skill and foresight, accom- 
plished, with God to aid, by a breath. The de- 
fensive strength of Jericho was greater, compared 
with the means of attack then known, than that 
of Sebastopol in the fifties of the last century, or 
of Plevna in the seventies, or of Port Arthur a 
few years since. Those walls were too high to be 
scaled, too massive to be beaten down, and they 
were defended by a great king and his mighty men 
of valor. From any moral point of view, the en- 
terprise of destroying the city was hopeless. Nor 
did the Lord add anything to such weapons of 
offense as Joshua already possessed. Seven trum- 
pets of rams' horns were the sole agents of the de- 
struction provided; and not the trumpets them- 
selves, but the breath of the mouths of the seven 
priests who should blow through them, should 
overthrow those topless ramparts, and give the 
king and his army and his people into the hand of 
the men of Israel. Were such a proposition pre- 
sented to our consideration to-day, we can imagine 
what would be the comments of the Army and 
Navy departments, of Congress, of the editors of 
newspapers, of witty paragraphers, and of the 



xvi Preface 

man on the street. Possibly the churches them- 
selves might hesitate before giving their support 
to such a plan of war: ;< We must take the bibli- 
cal stories in a figurative sense ! ", But stout 
Joshua had seen the angel of the Lord, with his 
sword drawn, the night before ; and he knew noth- 
ing of figures of speech. He got the seven trum- 
pets of rams' horns, and put them in the hands of 
the seven priests, and led the hosts of the Israelites 
round and round the walls of Jericho day after 
day for six days, the trumpets blowing amain, and 
the hosts silent. And on the seventh day, the 
hosts compassed the walls of the city seven times; 
" And at the seventh time, when the priests blew 
with the trumpets, Joshua said unto the people, 
Shout; for the Lord hath given you the city. . . . 
So the people shouted when the priests blew with 
the trumpets ; and it came to pass, when the people 
heard the sound of the trumpets, and the people 
shouted with a great shout, that the walls fell 
down flat, so that every man went up into the city, 
every man straight before him, and they took the 
city. And they utterly destroyed all that was 
within the city." 

Yes, the biblical stories are to be taken in a 
figurative sense ; they stand as symbols for spiritual 
actions in the nature of man; though that is not 
to say that the events narrated did not actually 
take place as recorded. But Joshua had faith ; 
and faith in the hearts of the champions of right 



Preface xvii 

begets fear in the hearts of supporters of wrong, 
and the defenses they have so laboriously built up 
tumble distractedly about their ears when the 
trumpets of the Lord blow and the people who 
believe in Him utter a mighty shout. Our jails 
are our Jericho; the evils which they encompass 
and protect are greater than the sins of that strong 
city; but a breath may shatter them into irretrieva- 
ble ruin. Not compromises ; not gradual and cir- 
cumspect approaches; not prudent considerations 
of political economy, nor sound sociological prin- 
ciples; but simple faith in God and a blast on the 
ram's horn. 

My business in this book was to show that penal 
imprisonment is an evil, and its perpetuation a 
crime ; that it does not reform the criminal but de- 
stroys him body and soul; that it does not protect 
the community but exposes it to incalculable perils ; 
and that the assumption that a criminal class exists 
among us separate and distinct from any and the 
best of the rest of us is Pharisaical, false and 
wicked. The " Subterranean Brotherhood " are 
our brothers they are ourselves, unjustly and 
vainly condemned to serve as scapegoats for the 
rest. What the criminal instinct or propensity in 
a man needs is not seclusion, misery, pain and 
despotic control, but free air and sunlight, free 
and cheerful human companionship, free oppor- 
tunity to play his part in human service, and the 
stimulus, on all sides of him, of the example of 



xviii Preface 

such service. Men enfeebled by crime are not 
cured by punishment, or by homilies and precepts, 
but by taking off our coats and showing them per- 
sonally how honest and useful things' are done. 
And let every lapse and failure on their part to 
follow the example, be counted not against them, 
but against ourselves who failed to convince them 
of the truth, and hold them up to the doing of 
good. Had we been sincere and hearty enough, 
we would have prevailed. 

I do not underrate the difficulties; they are im- 
measurable; the hope seems as forlorn as that of 
the Israelites against the walls of Jericho. But 
they are forlorn and immeasurable only because, 
and so long as, we let our selfish personal interests 
govern and mold our public and social action. 
Altruism will not heal the inward sore, but at best 
only put on its surface a plausible plaster which 
leaves the inward still corrupt; for altruism is a 
policy and not an impulse, proceeding not from 
the heart but from the intelligence the policy 
of enlightened selfishness. It has already been 
tried thoroughly, and proved thoroughly ineffi- 
cient; it is the motive power behind charitable 
organization; it breeds a cold, impersonal, eco- 
nomic spirit in charity workers, and coldness, in- 
gratitude and resentment in those who are worked 
upon. It will not do to speak of Tom, Dick and 
Harry as cases Nos. i, 2 and 3. You must call 
them by name and think of them as flesh of your 



Preface xix 

flesh and blood of your blood, to whom you owe 
more than they owe you, or than you can repay. 
Put a heart into them by giving them your own 
heart; do not look down on them and advise them, 
but at and into them and take counsel with them; 
or even up to them, and learn from them. They 
know and feel much that you have never felt or 
known. 

The book is full of shortcomings, imperfections, 
omissions, and repetitions. But there is meaning 
and purpose in it, and I hope it may do its work. 

JULIAN HAWTHORNE 



THE 

SUBTERRANEAN 
BROTHERHOOD 



THE SUBTERRANEAN 
BROTHERHOOD 

I 
INTRODUCTORY 

CONSPIRACIES of silence it is a common 
phrase; but it has never been better illus- 
trated than in regard to what goes on rn prisons, 
here and in other parts of the world. The con- 
spiracy has been attacked sometimes, and more of 
late than usual, and once in a while we have caught 
a glimpse of what is occurring behind those smug, 
well-fitting doors. But they have been mere 
glimpses, incoherent, obscure, often imaginative, 
or guesswork based on scanty, incorrect, at any 
rate secondhand information; never yet conclusive 
and complete. In England, Charles Dickens 
and Charles Reade have personally visited prisons, 
talked with prisoners, written stories that have 
stirred the world, and forced improvements. 
Great prisoners like Kropotkin have related their 
experiences in Russia, and our own George Ken- 
nan prompted us to congratulate ourselves, in our 
complacent ignorance, that our methods of gen- 



2 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

crating virtue out of crime were not like those 
of the Russians. It was annoying, after this, to 
be assured by writers in some of our magazines 
called muckrakers by some, pioneers- by others 
that after a sagacious, eager, well-equipped in- 
vestigation into our own prison conditions, peer- 
ing into depths, interrogating convicts, searching 
records, they had found little difference in prin- 
ciple between our way of handling offenses against 
law, and that of our Cossack neighbors. The lat- 
ter are more sensational and red-blooded about it, 
that is all. These revelations compelled some 
removals and a few reforms; but they too failed 
to bring home livingly to public knowledge and 
imagination the whole ugly, sluggish, vicious 
truth. 

Then, only yesterday, an amiable, nai've and im- 
pressionable young gentleman underwent a week 
of amateur convictship in one of our jails, and 
came forth tremulous with indignation and aston- 
ishment; though, obviously and inevitably, he did 
not have to endure the one thing which, more than 
hardship or torture, is the main evil of penal im- 
prisonment the feeling of helplessness and out- 
rage in the presence of a despotic and unrighteous 
power, from which there is no appeal or escape. 
The convict has no rights, no friends, and no fu- 
ture; the amateur may walk out whenever he 
pleases, and will be received by an admiring fam- 
ily and friends, and extolled by public opinion as 



Introductory 3 

a reformer who suffered martyrdom in the cause. 
Yet what he has experienced and learned falls as 
far short of what convicts endure, as the emotions 
of a theater-goer at a problem play (with a tango 
supper awaiting him in a neighboring restaurant) 
fall short of the long-drawn misery and humiliation 
of those who undergo in actuality what the play 
pretended. 

Meanwhile, scores of animated humanitarians, 
penologists, criminologists, theorists and idealists 
have consulted, resolved, recommended, and agi- 
tated, striking hard but in the dark, and most of 
their blows going wide. Commissioners and in- 
spectors have appeared menacingly at prison gates, 
loudly heralded, equipped with plenipotentiary 
powers; and the gates have been thrown wide by 
smiling wardens and sympathetic guards tender 
hearted, big brained, gentle mannered people, their 
mouths overflowing with honeyed words and bland 
assurances, their clubs and steel bracelets snugly 
stowed away in unobtrusive pockets who have 
personally and assiduously conducted their honored 
visitors through marble corridors, clean swept cells, 
spacious dining saloons, sanctimonious chapels, 
studious libraries and sunny yards; and have stood 
helpfully by while happy felons told their tales of 
cheerful hours of industry alternating with long 
periods of refreshing exercise and peaceful repose ; 
nay, these officials will sometimes quite turn their 
backs upon the confidences between prisoner and in- 



4 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

vestigator, lest there should seem to be even a 
shadow of restraint in the outpourings. " Is all 
we ll? _ All is well! " " No complaints? " 
" No complaints ! " What, then, could inspectors 
and commissioners do except bid a friendly and 
apologetic adieu to their ingenuous entertainers, 
and go forth bearing in each hand a pail of freshest 
whitewash? And if, during the colloquies, any ma- 
lignant prisoner had happened, in a burst of reck- 
less despair, to venture on an indiscreet disclosure, 
the visitors were allowed to get well out of earshot 
before the thud of clubs on heads was heard, and 
the groans of victims chained to bars in dark cells 
of airless stench, underneath the self same polished 
floors which had but an hour before resounded to 
paeans of eulogy and contentment. 

This is not a fancy picture no, not even of 
what is known to judges and attorneys (but not 
to prisoners) as " The model penitentiary of 
America,'* down in sunny Georgia. Fancy is not 
needed to round out the tale to be told of condi- 
tions existing and of things done and suffered in 
this age and country, behind walls which shut in 
fellow creatures of ours whom facile jurors and 
autocratic courts have sent to living death and to 
worse than death in accordance with laws passed 
by legislatures for the benefit of What, or 
Whom? Of the community? Of social order 
and security? Of outraged morality? Of the 
reform of convicts themselves? These questions 



Introductory 5 

may be considered as we go along. Meanwhile 
we may take notice that a number of persons, more 
or less deserving, gain their livelihood by the de- 
tection, indictment, arrest, conviction and im- 
prisonment of other persons more or less unde- 
serving; and whether or not these proceedings or 
any of them are rash or prudent, straight or 
crooked, just or tyrannous, lenient or cruel, honest 
or corrupt is of secondary importance. What 
is of first importance is to supply fuel for the fur- 
nace of this unwieldy machine which operates our 
criminal system. Our costly courts must have oc- 
cupation, our expensive jails must be kept full. 
We have succumbed to the disease which has been 
called legalism the persuasion that the craving 
for individual initiative born of the unsettling of 
old faiths and the opening of new horizons, as well 
as the consequences of poverty, misery, ignorance, 
and hereditary incompetence that this vast turn- 
ing of the human tide, manifesting itself in many 
forms, some benign, many evil that this broad 
and profound phenomenon can be met and con- 
trolled only by force, suppression, punishment, the 
infliction of physical pain and moral humiliation. 

This disease perverts that beautiful and ideal 
impulse toward mutual order and self-restraint, 
which is Law, into lust for arbitrary and impudent 
power to control the acts and even the thoughts of 
men down to petty personal details; so that human 
life, at this very moment when it most needs and 



6 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

aspires to enlightened liberty, is crushed back into 
mechanical conformity with statutory regulations 
to which no common assent has been or can be 
obtained, and the logical consequences of which 
are as yet but obscurely recognized, even by the 
limited portion of the community which has been 
active in establishing them. To give it its most 
favorable interpretation, it is a sort of crazy 
counsel of perfection, incompatible with the healthy 
tenor and contents of human nature, and sure in 
the end to involve in its errant tentacles not only 
those who are the avowed objects of its pursuit, but 
likewise the lawmakers and enforcers themselves. 
Like all abuses, in its own entrails are the seeds of 
its destruction. Laws now on our books, if radi- 
cally applied, would land almost every mother's son 
of us behind prison bars. And no doubt, when the 
murderer, forger, swindler, or white slaver, in his 
cell, begins to recognize in his new cell mate the 
judge who sentenced him, the attorney who prose- 
cuted him, the juryman who convicted him, or the 
plaintiff who accused him, we shall find it expedient 
to subject our legal nostrums to a system of purga- 
tion, and our fever of legalism will abate. But 
if we will take thought betimes we may meet the 
trouble half way, and thus avert, perhaps, the 
danger that the fever will be checked only by the 
overturning of all law, sane or insane. The fol- 
lowing chapters are designed to help in defeating 
a catastrophe so unlovely. 



Introductory 7 

Be it observed, first, that the only persons com- 
petent to reveal prison life as it is are persons who 
have been sentenced to prisons and lived in them 
as prisoners. Such showings might have been 
made long ago and often but that those who knew 
the facts were afraid to speak, or could not win 
belief, or had not education and capacity for ex- 
pression requisite to get their facts printed. 
Others, exhausted or unmanned by their sufferings, 
wished only to hide themselves and forget and be 
forgotten; others have indictments still hanging 
over them, to be pressed should they betray a dis- 
position to loquacity. Seldom, at any rate, has a 
man trained as a writer lived out a prison sentence 
and emerged with the ability and determination to 
throw the prison doors ajar and expose what has 
hitherto been invisible, unknown, and unsuspected. 

Such a story has importance, because there is no 
group of persons anywhere but has some relation 
near or remote to what goes on in prisons. And 
the constant output of new laws, creating new 
crimes (so that one might say a man goes to bed 
innocent and wakes guilty) this delirious in- 
dustry must goad us all into feeling a personal in- 
terest in the administration of our penal machinery. 
You saw your friend tried and sentenced yesterday; 
you may yourself stand in the dock to-morrow, 
knowing yourself morally innocent, astounded at 
finding yourself technically guilty. Yet you your- 
self by your civic neglect or ignorance contributed 



8 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

to the enactment of the statute which now catches 
you tripping. You had better search into these 
matters, and find out what the authorities whom 
you helped to office are doing with their authority. 

I have served my term in prison. The strain of 
that experience has not sharpened my appetite to 
bear testimony; my desire, as evening falls, is for 
rest and tranquillity. But I owe it to my American 
birth, parentage and posterity, which connect me 
with what is honorable in my country, and to my 
individual manhood, to do what I hold to be a duty. 
Especially am I sensible of the claim upon me of 
those voiceless fellow men of mine still behind the 
bars, who cannot help themselves, who have hon- 
ored me with their tragic confidences, who have 
believed that I would do my utmost to let the 
truth be known and show the world what penal 
imprisonment really means. I will keep faith with 
them. 

I do not know that my attempt will succeed. 
Not every reader has imagination or sympathy 
enough to step into another's shoes especially 
into the sorry shoes of a convict and to realize 
facts which, even if we credit them, are disquieting 
and unpleasant. They make us uncomfortable 
and keep us awake at night. It is pleasanter to 
ignore or forget them, to say that they must be 
exaggerated, or that their purveyor has some ax of 
his own to grind ; besides, do not abuses cure them- 
selves in time ? and there is always time enough ! 



Introductory 9 

Three or four men, while I was spending my 
months in jail, had time to die of broken health and 
broken hearts, due to physical assaults or neglect, 
combined with a system of mental torture yet more 
effective and barbarous. Hundreds more are in 
similar plight, in Atlanta jail alone, who might be 
saved by timely attention and common humanity. 
Of this, more anon. I wish now to say that I un- 
dertake this work with a purpose as serious as I 
am capable of; and that among the inducements 
that move me, personal grudge and grievance are 
not included. Individual enmities are foolish and 
sterile for the individuals, and a bore for every- 
body else. Individuals are never so much to be 
hated as are the conditions which prompt them 
to act hatefully. Improve the environment which 
produced the murderer, robber, corrupt judge, ras- 
cally attorney, cruel warden, brutal guard, and you 
are likely to get a creature quite humane and tolera- 
ble. On the other hand, however, in the process 
of opposing evil conditions, one cannot avoid con- 
tact with the human products of them some- 
times in a stern and conclusive manner. With- 
out going the length of the Spanish Inquisition, 
which tortured the body on earth in order to save 
the soul for heaven, it is not to be denied that 
punishment for evil deeds is latent in the bowels 
of the evil doer and will make him suffer in one 
way or another. We cannot strike a bad condi- 
tion without hitting somebody who is carrying j> 



1O The Subterranean Brotherhood 

out; and I am in the position of the Quaker who 
went to war: "Friend," he admonished his foe- 
man, " thee is standing just where I am going to 
shoot !" 

I am not disposed to present here, in the way 
of credentials, any account of the circumstances 
that landed me in prison; still less to plead any- 
thing in the way of extenuation. The District 
Attorney, in his address, described me as a mem- 
ber of one of the most dangerous band of crooks 
and swindlers that ever infested New York. The 
government of this country authorized his state- 
ment; the news was bruited afar, wherever men 
read and write and invest money on the planet, 
and it appealed to every city editor and scandal- 
monger. Julian Hawthorne, son of the author of 
" The Scarlet Letter," a pickpocket. Well, what 
next! 

If ever I cherished the notion that the charge 
was too preposterous to be believed, I was 
abundantly undeceived. To jail I went, and there 
served out my time to the uttermost limit allowed 
by the law. But in this connection I must touch 
on a matter which caused me some annoyance at 
the time. 

In June of 1913 an editorial appeared in a New 
York newspaper endorsing some petitions which 
had been circulated asking the President of the 
United States to pardon me, mainly on the ground 
that in my ignorance of business I had been more 



Introductory 1 1 

of an innocent dupe than a deliberate malefactor. 
I had known nothing of these petitions; had I 
known of them, I would have omitted no effort 
to prevent them. 

But I did get hold of the editorial; and found 
myself placed in the position of admitting myself 
guilty of the crime charged against me, but cow- 
ering under the pitiful excuse of having been bam- 
boozled by others. What was even less tolerable, 
it presented me as entreating pardon of a govern- 
ment from which I would in fact have accepted 
nothing short of an unconditional apology. The 
Government had done me an injury under forms 
of law; I am only one man, and the Government 
stands for a hundred millions; but justice has no 
concern with numbers. My mining company and 
I were ruined; the iron and silver which we tried 
to put on the market will enrich others after we 
are gone; but I knew that what I and my partners 
had said of them was true. What had I to do 
with " pardons " ? Pardon for what? 

I lost no time in writing a letter to the editor 
of the paper, defining my attitude in the matter; 
but it never reached him. It is in the private safe 
of Warden Moyer, of Atlanta or so I was in- 
formed by the Deputy Warden, when I was re- 
leased in October and for aught I know or care 
it may remain there forevermore. 

Whether my respect for Law is higher or lower 
than is that of those persons who are responsible 



12 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

for my being sent to prison and kept there, may 
appear hereafter. But if crime be the result of 
anti-social impulses, then I hold that our present 
statutes fail to include under their .categories, 
numerous and inquisitive though they be, a class 
of criminals who do, or intend, quite as much 
harm as was ever perpetrated by any man now 
under lock and key. Many of these persons oc- 
cupy high places; most of them are respectable. 
We meet them and greet them in society. I 
know them, and also the murderers, highwaymen 
and yeggs of the penitentiary; and when I want 
sincere, charitable, generous human companion- 
ship, my choice is for the latter. 



II 

THE DEVIL'S ANTECHAMBER 

THE judge pronounced our several prison sen- 
tences; that they were not also sentences of 
death was due to circumstances which developed 
later. The jury had previously dispersed, clothed 
in the sanctity of duties discreetly performed, 
knowing why they did them, and enjoying what- 
ever consolation or advantage appertained thereto. 
Marshal Henkel cast upon us the look of the tur- 
key buzzard as he swoops upon his prey, and we 
found ourselves being hustled down the familiar 
corridors, and into a room which we had not 
visited before; a few assistant marshals were 
there, and ere long a knot of newspaper men en- 
tered, observant and sympathetic, ready to receive 
and record the last words of the condemned. 

It was about six o'clock of a dark and rainy 
March evening. " Any statement you would like 
to make?" One stands upon the brink of the 
living world, facing the darkness and silence, and 
hears that question. 

Here is an end of things, a nothing, a sort of 
death. The support and countenance of one's fel- 
low creatures are withdrawn; you are no longer 

13 



14 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

a part of organized social existence. The rights, 
privileges and courtesies of manhood are stripped 
from you. You are adjudged unfit to touch the 
hand of an honest man in greeting; you^are made 
impotent, disgraced, consigned to the refuse heap. 
The helpless shame put upon you is borne tenfold 
by those who bear your name, those you love and 
who love you. All that touches you henceforth 
shall be sordid, base and foul. 

The prison officials who stand near you meet 
your eye with a leer of familiarity; they have 
handled thousands of men in your situation; they 
will have a grin or a growl for any remonstrance 
or protest you may make; power over you has 
been given to them; in you there is no power. 
You cannot blame them; their authority was 
deputed to them by men above them, who in turn 
received it from others; they are parts of the 
great machine, working irresistibly and auto- 
matically. 

The judge is blameless; he had said, "The 
verdict of the jury makes it my painful duty to 
sentence you ! " The jury is not to blame ; they 
had decided upon the evidence, in accordance with 
their oath. The witnesses who bore testimony 
against you did they not testify upon a solemn 
adjuration to utter nothing but the truth, at the 
peril of their immortal souls ? The indictments to 
whose truth they bore witness were they not 
made and brought by officers appointed by law to 



The Devil's Antechamber 15 

seek only impartial justice, and sworn to seek it 
without fear or favor? 

Go back yet another step if you will, and con- 
sider the inspectors and detectives who gathered 
the complaints against you is the beginning with 
them? No: they did but act for the protection 
of the community against a crime of which you 
were suspected, which was resolved to be a crime 
by the representatives of the nation in Congress 
assembled that is, by the nation itself. You 
yourself, therefore, as part of the nation, share 
with the rest the responsibility for your present 
predicament. Then, whether the verdict against 
you were right or wrong whether you be in- 
nocent or guilty the blame at last comes home 
to you. 

Such is the reductio ad absurdum the lawyers' 
argument, technically flawless, though proceeding 
upon a transparent fallacy. That fallacy I shall 
consider hereafter; the question of the moment is 
the reporters' " Have you any statement to 
make?" 

Of what avail to answer? Has not enough 
been said during the trial of the past four months, 
and in vain? The young fellow stands there, 
courteously inquisitive, not unsympathetic perhaps, 
his pencil suspended. Have I any last words for 
the world which I am leaving? Shall I declaim of 
injustice, outrage, perjury? Shall I threaten re- 
venge, or entreat mercy? Shall I " break down," 



l6 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

or shall I " maintain an appearance of bravado " 

he is ready to record either. 

No, I will do none of these futile things. In 
such extremities, a man's manhood and dignity 
come to his support. I am helpless, to be sure, 
but only physically so. All this portentous para- 
phernalia of court and prison can touch nothing 
more than my body my spirit is unscathed. It 
is the ancient consolation, coming down through 
poetry and history even to me. The Government 

the Nation can destroy my life, separate me 
from my people, throw mud on my name ; but they 
cannot take away one atom of my consciousness of 
the truth. And it is better to have that conscious- 
ness than to retain all the rest without it. Blessed 
ethical truisms, which come to our succor when all 
else falls away ! 

Accordingly, the reporters were supplied with 
a few grave, not sensational words, suggested by 
the spur of the moment; they receded into the 
background, and Marshal Henkel, zealous to do 
his whole duty, and prevent the escape of an 
elderly gentleman through locked doors, echoing 
corridors, and the resistance of half a dozen lusty 
guards, advanced to the front of the stage and 
gave the order, " Handcuffs ! " Knowing my 
marshal as I 3id, I was prepared for him, and ex- 
tended my arm, till I felt the steel close round it 
with a solid snap. I was a manacled convict, and 
the community was saved. 



The Devil's Antechamber 17 

But no time was to be lost; it was already after 
hours for the city prison; and the stout party of 
the other part of the handcuff and I passed out 
through the opening door promptly. As we 
turned the corner of the corridor, I suddenly saw 
the face of one of my sons-in-law, pale in the elec- 
tric light; he forced a smile to his lips, and threw 
up one hand in greeting and farewell. Ah, those 
who are left behind! who can compensate them, 
and how can the injury done them be forgiven? I 
smiled a moment to myself as I thought of the 
ready answer of the august purveyor of the law 
" You should have thought of that when you com- 
mitted your crime ! " That answer is also a part 
of the automatic machinery, and comes out, when 
the button is pressed, as inevitably as the package 
of chewing-gum from its receptacle even more 
so! 

I felt the rain on my face as we emerged from 
the old postoffice building, and saw the slanting 
drops as we passed through the rays of the street 
lamp on the corner. It was a memorable journey 
for me, short in its material aspect, long other- 
wise; and I noticed the particulars. Newspaper 
Row loomed on the right, strange in its familiarity, 
my work-place of many years. Here was the 
Third Avenue terminal, whence, a few hours be- 
fore, I had confidently expected to take the train 
homeward, a free and vindicated man. There 
were glimpses, in the wet glare, of black head- 



i8 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

lines of newspapers, and the shrill professional 
cries of the gamins, " Hawthorne convicted ! " It 
Was like living in a detective story but this was 
real! 

But then came the thought that had often visited 
me in the past months, as I sat in the dingy court- 
room, and listened perfunctorily to the legal 
wrangle, the abuse and defense, the long-drawn 
testimony of witnesses, the comment of the precise 
and genial judge, and contemplated idly the jaded, 
uncomfortable jury, the covert whispering of As- 
sistant District Attorneys and postoffice inspectors, 
the dangling maps and the piles of documents 
when I had asked myself, " Is all this real, or are 
they transient symbols importing a concealed 
significance?" Then, to my imagination, the 
empty walls would seem to melt away, and I saw 
a great, benign face and figure above the bench of 
the judge, holding a trial of those who labored 
so busily a trial not entered in the books, and 
alien from that which occupied us; and recording 
judgments, unheard here, but eternal. 

Was that the reality? Then let come what 
might on this plane of foolish contention, where 
we strive to cover the Immutable with the petty 
mask of our mutabilities. We sweat and toil for 
ends which we know not, and our paltry and blind 
decisions, our triumphs and failures, determine 
nothing but the degree of our own ignorance and 
impotence. The Lord's aims and issues are not 



The Devil's Antechamber 19 

ours, and ours do but measure our spiritual stature, 
and direct our immortal destiny, in His sight. 

Yes, but this palpable world has its place and 
function nevertheless, to be accepted and used 
while time lasts. If those who tried me were on 
trial, I had no personal concern in the matter. 
My business, now, was to keep pace with my com- 
panion, who obligingly allowed his arm to swing 
with mine, so that passers-by, even if they could 
afford to divert their attention from their own 
footing on the muddy pavements, and from the 
management of their umbrellas, would not have 
noticed the bond uniting him and me. For this 
courtesy the only possible one in the circum- 
stances I took occasion to express my recogni- 
tion, to which he responded with easy friendliness. 
'* We don't never make no trouble for them as 
don't go to hunt none," was his remark. 

We were now in Centre Street, and the Tombs 
was close at hand; and I drew into my lungs full 
draughts of the open air, murky though it was, 
reflecting that my opportunities of doing so in 
future would be limited. 

Here were the steps supporting the tall steel 
gate, through which, in former days, I had seen 
many a poor devil pass; it was now others' turn to 
commiserate, or to jeer, the poor devil that was 
myself. There was no delay we seemed to be 
awaited; and in the next minute I had felt what 
it is to be locked into a prison. I was behind bars, 



2O The Subterranean Brotherhood 

and could not get out at my own will nor at 
any one else's, for that matter; only at the im- 
personal fiat of the machine. 

My marshal chatted and laughed a moment 
with the keeper, then gave me his buxom paw in 
farewell. I was led through stone passages, past 
rows of barred cells from which peered visages of 
fellow prisoners, incurious and preoccupied, or 
truculent and reckless men under indictment 
and without bail, convicts making appeal, and cul- 
prits jailed for minor offenses. Such men were to 
be my comrades for the future. Some were out 
in the corridors, pacing up and down or chatting 
with friends; for the laws of the Tombs are un- 
searchable. 

It is a unique place, a Devil's Antechamber, 
where almost anything except what is decent and 
orderly may happen. It is not so much a prison 
or penitentiary as a human pound, where every 
variety of waif and stray turns up and sojourns 
for a while; murderers, pickpockets, political 
scapegoats, confidence men, old professionals, first- 
time offenders, even suspects afterwards to be 
proved innocent. There is nothing that I know 
of to prevent thorough-going convicts from getting 
in here permanently; the Tombs is of catholic hos- 
pitality. But they do not properly belong here; 
it is but their halfway house the antechamber. 

And discrimination must be observed in classify- 
ing the inmates; no one here likes to be regarded 



The Devil's Antechamber 21 

as beyond hope of bettering or escaping from his 
restricted condition. He wears his own clothes, 
for one thing and no small thing; he is not 
known by a number; it is not, I believe, en regie to 
club him into insensibility at will and with im- 
punity, or to starve him to death, or so much as 
to hang him up by the wrists in a dark cell. The 
guards or keepers do not go about visibly armed 
with revolvers or rifles; talking and smoking are 
not prohibited; the grotesque assemblage is let 
out into the corridors occasionally, where they 
shamble up and down and exchange observations 
and confidences; and they have an hour outdoors 
in the stone paved, high-walled yard. 

Moreover, extraordinary liberties can be ob- 
tained, if you know how to go about it, and possess 
the means of bandaging inconvenient eyes. Not 
only are we permitted to stampede our quotas of 
bedbugs, but leave may be had to decorate our 
cells with souvenirs of art and domesticity, to 
soften our sitting-down appliances with cushions, 
to drape the curtain of modesty before the grating 
of restriction, to carpet our stone flooring, to sup- 
ply our leisure hours with literary nourishment, 
to secrete stealthy cakes and apples for bodily 
solace, to enjoy surreptitious and not over-hazard- 
ous corridor outings when others are locked up, 
to write and receive any sort of letters at any times, 
without having them first read and stamped by 
licensed letter-ghouls. 



22 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

More, there was at least one man among my 
companions there who contrived, by devices which 
I never sought to fathom, to pass the immitigable 
outer gates themselves every day, attend to his 
business in the outer world for as many hours as 
might serve, returning quietly in time for last roll- 
call. He took a keeper with him, of course, but 
only in orjier to assuage possible anxiety on the 
part of those responsible for his security; and one 
cannot help suspecting that as soon as the two 
found themselves under the free sky, the keeper 
betook himself to some friendly saloon, moving- 
picture palace, or other inviting retreat, and only 
saw the other again when they met by appointment 
in their trysting place. 

It was safe enough no doubt; the prisoner 
would hardly think it worth his while to attempt 
actual disimprisonment; he was content to sleep 
at night in his cosy and comfortable cell. But 
the Moral Powers who live in white waistcoats and 
saintly collars might have been restless in their 
innocent sleep, had they known what things are 
practicable under the austere name of incarcera- 
tion in the City Prison. 

Revolving these matters, I could only come to 
the conclusion that they pointed in one direction, 
namely, toward the anachronism and absurdity of 
our whole theory of punishment by imprisonment. 
As I shall have plenty of cause to give full discus- 
sion to this subject later on, I will only touch it 



The Devil's Antechamber 23 

here; but the fact is that we imprison malefactors 
or law-breakers (not always synonymous by any 
means, since there are a score of artificial crimes 
for one real one) not because we believe that to be 
the right thing for them, but simply by reason of 
our inability to imagine anything more suitable 
and sane. Moreover, there are the steel and 
stone jail buildings themselves, which cost much 
in money and more in graft; what shall be done 
with them? The wardens and guards, too all 
the fantastic appanages of these institutions are 
they to be cast incontinently upon a frigid world? 

The law, in short, lags leagues and ages behind 
the moral sense of the community, so encumbered 
with its baggage train that it can never fetch up 
lost ground. We know perfectly well that the 
only punishments that can improve men are punish- 
ments of conscience from within, and of love from 
without which is practically the same thing; and 
that punishment by imprisonment is punishment 
by hate in fact, whatever it may be in theory, and 
therefore diabolical and destructive. It can only 
inflame and multiply the evils it pretends to heal ; 
and this is no theory, but a certified and established 
truth. Everybody who has been through it, 
knows it, everybody who dares to think may know 
it. 

The whole thing is ridiculous, a huge and clumsy 
absurdity, stepping on its own feet and smelling 
to heaven. And here in our America it is to-day 



24 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

worse than in Italy or Russia, in some respects, 
because we know better that it is wrong, and there- 
fore try to hide its enormities from open daylight. 
We lie and dissimulate about it, investigators 
whitewash it, conservative citizens deprecate ex- 
aggeration about it, wardens and guards some 
of them, not all are more wicked in their secret 
practises with convicts than they would be if they 
did not know that they wbuld be stopped if the 
community knew of them. And it was inevitable 
that only a low type of men would accept posi- 
tions as guards and wardens, because no honest 
man worth his salt could afford to work for the 
pay that these officials get; and the latter them- 
selves would not work for it, did they not depend 
upon stealing twice as much, or more, by the graft. 

But the system, inwardly rotten, crumbles; and 
in the interval remaining before it falls, the devil 
is getting in some of his most strenuous work. I 
know, and rejoice, that enlightened and magnani- 
mous methods are obtaining in some places; hearty 
and brave men, here and there, are making them- 
selves wardens of the good in men instead of ex- 
ploiters of the evil. But in most prisons 
among them, in that one down in Atlanta, whence 
I come the devil is laboring overtime, conscious 
that his time is short. 

The worst criminals there as God sees crimi- 
nals are not the men in branded attire who sit 
in their cells and slouch about their sterile tasks, 



The Devil's Antechamber 25 

but men who walk the ranges in uniform, and who 
sit in the rooms of managers; for the crimes of the 
former are crimes of poverty or of passion, but 
those of the latter are voluntary, unforced, spon- 
taneous crimes against human nature itself. They 
are upheld in high places; they are fortified by 
difficulty of " technical proof " ; they are guarded 
by the menace of the spy system, and of criminal 
libel; but there is some reason to think that their 
term is near. 

But let us return to that queer Antechamber of 
the Devil at the corner of Centre and Franklin 
Streets. 

There is a picture by that strange and unmatch- 
able English artist of the Eighteenth Century, 
William Hogarth, of the mad house in London 
know as Bedlam. If he were here, he might 
draw a companion picture of the Tombs. The 
one is as much as the other a crazy, incoherent, 
irrational, futile place, yet embodying very ac- 
curately a certain aspect of the civic attitude to- 
ward the insanity of vice and crime of the day. 
There is nothing intelligent, purposeful, trench- 
ant or radical about it; it is planted in ignorance 
and grows by neglect. 

The keepers of it are good natured people 
enough, with a sense of humor, and free from 
trammels of principle, official or ethical. Their 
greatest severity is exercised toward those who 
stand outside the gates and crave permission to 



26 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

visit their friends within; these find the way 
arduous and beset with pitfalls of " orders," hours, 
and other mystic rites, except where they blow in 
miraculously, enforced by some breath from on 
high. 

The inmates themselves, meantime, get on quite 
prosperously, so long .at least as their money or 
money's worth holds out. There is no license or 
aptitude on their guardians' part to club them for 
relaxation's sake, or to kick them into underground 
dungeons for " observation " (you will under- 
stand that term by and by) , or in any manner 
to hold a carnival of wanton brutality with them. 
The general idea is merely to keep them some- 
where inside the building for the appointed or con- 
venient time ; beyond that, a liberal view is adopted 
of the conditions of their sojourn. They can buy 
eats to suit themselves, and have them served to 
them in their cells; they can hold communication 
with one another and with the outer world; I sup- 
pose they might wear evening dress after six 
o'clock if they wanted to. They are not victims 
of despotic and irresponsible power, and this is 
not only good for them, but also for the keepers, 
who are not led into the degradation and mon- 
strous inhumanities which the possession of such 
power breeds in regular prisons. 

Most of these prisoners expect to get out before 
long, either to go on to more permanent quarters, 
or to be liberated altogether; many of them 



The Devil's Antechamber 27 

emerge with comparatively small loss of social 
standing; for, indeed, highly respectable persons 
occasionally stray in here. The Tombs is not 
regarded as a final or fatal misfortune in a man's 
career. Yet it has its drawbacks. 

Dirt is one of the more obvious of these; I 
might call it filth, but it depends on how one has 
been brought up. The impurity, at any rate, is 
not confined to the surfaces of the cells, floors 
and walls, but it creeps into the current language, 
and permeates the atmosphere. I am convinced 
that there never has been or could be a houseful^ 
of people who hear or use fouler and more unre- 
mitting obscenities than are those which flow 
sewer-wise and unhindered from the lips of many 
of this population. 

It dribbles and exgurgitates, black and noisome, 
at the slightest provocation nay, at none what- 
ever, but with the delight of the past master and 
artist in verbal nastiness, anxious to display his 
erudition. It is a corruption of thought and ex- 
pression so foul and concentrated, and withal so 
limited in its vocabulary and scope, that it fastens 
itself in the ear by a damnable iteration which no 
diverting of the attention can overcome; and it 
announces a depth of moral and mental debase- 
ment which seems as far from human as from 
merely animal possibilities; it is of the uttermost 
soundings of Tophet, and would probably be modi- 
fied by fresh-heated gridirons even there. 



28 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

This speech, or verbosity rather for it has 
none of the logic or continuity of mortal utterances 
does not continue uninterruptedly during the 
day, but observes special hours, when the guards 
are paying even less than their usual attention to 
the vagaries of their charges. Of these periods, 
the hours of Dearly dawn are the most fertile. 

When I dwelt in the environs of the city, it was 
my fortunate habit, in summer, to awake at dawn, 
just before sunrise, when the wide pasture out- 
side my window was still obscure with the 
shadows of night, but the sky had begun to kindle 
with the splendors of day. In a group of dark- 
some trees beside a little stream two hundred paces 
distant a song thrush was wont to trill forth the 
holy soul of awakening nature in such a paean of 
deathless Pan as inspired John Keats to utter the 
melodies of his magic ode. It consecrated the 
footsteps of the approaching sun, and the hearer 
was borne back on its swelling current to those 
pure early aeons of the human race, when love was 
the lord of life and innocence went forth crowned 
with rapture. 

For this hymn of the primal gods was now sub- 
stituted the hideous strophes and antistrophes of 
the grimy spirits of darkest New York. As one 
performer after another took up the strain, to and 
fro and from upper to lower tiers of cells, one 
awaited some seismic cataclysm to put an end to 
it and them; and the pauses of it were punctuated 



The Devil's Antechamber 29 

by bursts of dreary laughter, applausive of the 
incredible gushings of blighting depravity. They 
were the heralds of the prison day the tune to 
which its steps were set. After it was over 
when the yawning keeper had rattled the bars and 
threatened a twelve-hour close confinement to the 
perpetrators one was amazed to identify with 
the latter persons outwardly in human shape, in- 
stead of malformed and sooty fiends from the bot- 
tomless abyss. I doubt whether anything to range 
with this occurs in any other criminal cauldron in 
the world; and therefore, with stopped nostrils, 
have I tried to give some faint adumbration of its 
character. 

The head keeper of the menagerie I saw but 
once or twice; he was of Falstaffian proportions, 
with a clear and steady masculine eye and a de- 
meanor of genial and complacent authority. He 
knew what and when to see and not to see, and had 
his own measure of the legalities and the pro- 
prieties. Little gusts of investigations and re- 
forms passed by him as the eddying dust of the 
street sweeps by granite skyscrapers. " J'y suis 
J'y reste! " was his motto. The subordinates had 
a general Irish complexion to my feeling; they 
were there to gather tips under the humorous guise 
of marshals of order. They were affable and 
easy, going as far as they could with only so much 
show of resistance as might lend more value to 
their yielding. 



30 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

The prisoners were as heterogeneous as the con- 
tents of a rag-picker's auction. Yet they asso- 
ciated with little friction, herding uniformly kind 
with kind, only rarely lending themselves to tran- 
sient ructions. They played little jokes on each 
other; a fat and serious captive was sitting of an 
evening at his cell door, absorbed in the perusal of 
a wide-spread newspaper; a gnome-like passerby 
in the corridor lit an unsuspected match, and sud- 
denly the newspaper was a sheet of flame. 

There were uglier spectacles; we had among 
us a fresh murderer, who after killing his wife had 
retained grudge enough against her to hack off 
her head. He kept darkly to his cell, sitting hour 
after hour with his head leaning on his hand, and 
eyes unswervingly downcast. His crime was not 
popular in that company, and none sought his com- 
panionship. At the other end of the scale were 
dazed, foreign creatures, guilty of they knew not 
what, gropingly and vainly striving to understand 
and to make themselves understood. There was 
the scum of the gutters; and there were men of 
intellect and high breeding, arming their hearts to 
resist shame and despair, and bending to soften 
the plight of children of misery below them. 

The soul of the new comer blenches and shivers 
occasionally as he contemplates the grisly, crazy 
scene, and thinks of all that menaces the women 
at home. And when, in the visiting hours, the 
women come and stare palely at the faces of those 



The Devil's Antechamber 31 

they love between the bars, wishing to cheer them, 
but appalled and made giddy by the abject and sor- 
did horror of the solid fact, those who stare back 
at them and try to smile feel the grating of the 
wheels of life on the harsh bottom of things. But 
a man's manhood must not give way; there must 
be no triumph over him of these assaults and un- 
derminings of the enemy. Soul gazes at soul; 
but the talk is superficial and trivial. He is 
drowning in the gulf, and she stands yearning on 
the brink, but there shall be no vain outcries or out- 
stretched arms. It is a condition wrought by men, 
not countenanced by God, and the spirit must com- 
mand the flesh to endure. 

Punch the button and listen once more to the 
refrain " You should have thought of that be- 
fore ! " But can our posterity ever be induced to 
believe that such inhumanities could have been 
committed in the divine name of Law ! 

I am not qualified to write the epic of the Devil's 
Antechamber; I abode there but ten days, as we 
reckon time. On a cool and clear Easter Sunday 
morning the summons came to go forth to further 
adventures. Accompanied by three deputies, but 
free of the Henkel handcuffs, we passed the gates 
and trod the sunny pavements. Not a cloud in the 
blue sky, nor a taint upon the pure wings of the 
free air. None that saw us pass suspected our in- 
visible fetters. Yet to me at least the thought 



32 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

that had ministered to me in the actual courtroom 
and prison, that the fetters were a dream and 
freedom the reality, was not accessible then. The 
absence of physical bonds seemed to render the 
imprisonment more, not less undeniable. 

But we stepped out briskly, and breathed while 
we might. 



Ill 

THE ROAD TO OBLIVION 

FIVE of us stood on the platform of the Penn- 
sylvania station; one stayed behind as the 
train moved out. He was the answer to the ques- 
tion, " Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" " Who 
shall watch the watchman? " Our two marshals 
were to see that we did not escape; he was to 
see that they saw. But his function ended when 
the departing whistle blew. He was a lean, pale, 
taciturn personage in black; Marshal Henkel had 
perhaps substituted him for the handcuffs. There 
was nothing between us and freedom now but our 
brace of tipstaves, the train crew, the public in and 
out of the train, the train itself moving at a fifty 
mile an hour pace, the law, and our own common 
sense. Moreover, we had decided to see the ad- 
venture through. Something more than nine hun- 
dred miles, and twenty-six hours, lay between us 
and Atlanta. 

The elder of our two guardians was a short but 
wide gentleman of forty-five, of respectable attire 
and aspect, as of one who had seen the world and 
had formed no flattering opinion of its quality, yet 
had not permitted its imperfections to overcome 

33 



34 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

his native amiable tolerance. He was prepared to 
take things and men easy while they came that 
way, but could harden and insist upon due occasion. 
Human nature those varieties of it,' at least, 
which are not incompatible with criminal tend- 
encies was his "middle name" (as he might 
have phrased it), so that in his proper social en- 
vironment he was not apt to make social mistakes. 
This environment, however, could not but be con- 
stituted, in the main, of convicts either actual or 
potential; and there was probably no citizen, how- 
ever high his standing or spotless his ostensible 
record, who in this official's estimate might not 
have prison gates either before him or behind him, 
or both. To be able to maintain, under the 
shadow of convictions so harsh, a disposition so 
sunny, was surely an admirable trait of character. 
His assistant in the present job was still in the 
morning stage of his career; a big, red-headed, 
rosy-cheeked, and obtrusively brawny youth of 
five and twenty. He might be regarded as the 
hand of steel in the glove of velvet of the com- 
bination. He may have carried bracelets of steel 
in his rear pockets ; but his associate earnestly as- 
sured me that such was far from being the case. 
" I don't mind telling you the truth, Mr. Haw- 
thorne," he confided to me with a companionable 
twist of the near corner of his mouth, " I'd as soon 
think of cuffs, for gentlemen like you two, as 
nothin' in the world ! Why, it's like this as 



The Road to Oblivion 35 

far as I'm concerned, I'd just put a postage-stamp 
on you and ship you off by yourselves I'd know 
you'd turn up all right of yourselves at the other 
end! That's me; but of course, we has to foller 
the regulations; so there you are!" And the 
ruddy youngster stretched his herculean limbs and 
grinned, as who should say, " Cuffs ! Hell ! 
What d'yer know about that? Ain't I good for 
ten of yer? " 

As the comely Pennsylvania landscape slid by, 
my friend of a lifetime and I looked out on it with 
eyes that felt good-by. For us, the broad earth, 
bright sunshine and fresh air were a phantasma- 
goria we had no further part in them. From 
college days onward, through just fifty years of 
life, we had traveled almost side by side, giving the 
world the best that was in us, not without honor; 
and now our country had stamped us as felons and 
was sending us to jail. It had suddenly discovered 
in us a social and moral menace to its own integrity 
and order, and had put upon us the stigma of rats 
who would gnaw the timbers of the ship of state 
and corrupt its cargo. The end of it all was to be 
a penitentiary cell, and disgrace forever, to us and 
to ours. 

But was the disgrace ours and theirs? When 
you kick a mongrel cur it lies down on its back and 
holds up its paws, whining. But the thoroughbred 
acts quite otherwise ; you may kill it, but you cannot 
conquer it. We would not lie supine under the 



36 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

assault of the blundering bully. Disgrace cannot 
be inflicted from without, it can only come to a 
man from within. And the disgrace which is at- 
tempted unjustly must sooner or later be turned 
back on those who attempted it; the men whom 
our country had deputed to handle the machinery 
of law had blundered, and had convicted and con- 
demned those who had done no wrong. I had 
never felt or expressed anything stronger than con- 
tempt for any particular persons actively concerned 
in our indictment and trial the pack that had 
snapped and snarled so busily at our heels. Till 
the last I had believed that their purpose could 
not be accomplished, that the nation would 
awake to what was being done in the nation's court, 
under sanction of the nation's laws. The public 
must at last realize the moral impossibility that 
men who had all that is dearest to men to lose, 
should throw it away for such motives as were 
ascribed to us ascribed, but, as we felt, not 
established. And when the public realized that, 
thought I, they would perceive that the shame 
which the incompetent handling of the legal ma- 
chinery aimed to fix on us must finally root itself 
not in us but in the public; since the world and 
posterity, which, more for our names' sake than 
for our own, would note what was being done, 
would not distinguish between the employee and 
the master the country and the country's attor- 



The Road to Oblivion 37 

neys, and would hold the former and not the latter 
accountant. 

I was mistaken; the public took the thing 
resignedly to say the least. And though I con- 
sented to no individual animosities for indi- 
viduals in such transactions are but creatures of 
their trade, subdued to what they work in, like 
the dyer's hand I could not so easily absolve the 
impersonal master. The fault inhered of course 
not in any grudge of the community against us, but 
in the prevalent civic neglect (in which, in my time, 
I had participated with the rest) of duties to the 
state, theoretically impersonal, but which cannot 
proceed otherwise than on personal accounts. 

Man is frail; but, next to sincere religious con- 
viction, no principle exists so strong to control him 
as noblesse oblige the impulse to keep faith and 
to deal honestly imposed not by his individual con- 
science alone, but by the pure traditions of his in- 
heritance. The man who has the honor of his 
forefathers to preserve an honor which may be 
a part of the nation's honor is a hundred-fold 
better fortified against base action than is the son 
of thieves, or even of nobodies. The latter may 
find heroism enough to resist temptation, but the 
former is not tempted; he dismisses the thing at 
the start as preposterous. It is no credit to him to 
put such temptation aside, but it is black infamy 
and treachery to make terms with it. If he do 



38 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

make terms with it, no punishment can be too 
severe though I take leave to say that the ex- 
ternal penalties which state or nation can inflict are 
trivial compared with those deadly ones which tor- 
ture him from within; but before crediting him 
with having yielded, the state or nation should 
not merely assume his innocence a stipulation 
which our law indeed makes, but which is no- 
toriously disregarded by prosecuting attorneys 
but should weigh and sift with the most anxious 
and jealous scrutiny anything and everything which 
might appear inconsistent therewith. A son of a 
thief who steals does but follow his inborn instinct; 
but a thief whose ancestors were gentlemen is a 
monster, and monsters are rare. 

In England and the other older countries, the 
principle of noblesse oblige still has weight with the 
public as well as with the individual; here, the 
Welter of democracy, which has not evolved into 
distinct human form, uniformly ignores it; leveling 
down, not up, it is quick to see a scoundrel in any 
man. Meanwhile, instead of taking thought to 
abate the public mania for success in the form of 
concrete wealth which multiplies inducements to 
crime, it creates shallow statutes to punish accept- 
ance of such inducements, with the result that while 
in its practical life it rushes in one direction, it 
erects in its courts a fantastic counsel of perfection 
which points in a direction precisely opposite. 
Our law tends not merely to the penalizing of real 



The Road to Oblivion 39 

crimes, but to the manufacture of artificial ones; 
and the simple standard of natural or intuitive 
morals is bewilderingly complicated with a regimen 
of patent nostrums, conceived in error and ad- 
ministered in folly. 

Sitting in the car window with my friend, I re- 
volved these things, while the sunny landscape 
wheeled past outside, and our guardians chewed 
gum in the adjoining section. After all was said 
and done, amid whatever was strange and im- 
probable, he and I were going to the penitentiary 
in the guise of common swindlers. A pioneer on 
the western plains, in the old days, riding home- 
ward after several hours' absence, found his cabin 
a charred ruin, his property destroyed, his wife 
lying outraged with her throat cut, his children 
huddled among the debris with their brains dashed 
out. Sitting on his bronco, he contemplated the 
immeasurable horror of the catastrophe, and finally 
muttered, " This is ridiculous ! " 

' This is ridiculous ! " I remarked to my com- 
panion; and he consented with a smile; when 
language goes bankrupt, the simple phrase is least 
inadequate. " We may as well have lunch," he 
said; and we rose and journeyed to the rear of the 
train, sedulously attended by our deputies. The 
spontaneous routine of the physical life is often a 
valuable support to the spiritual, reminding the 
latter that we exist from one moment to another, 
and do wisely to be economical of forecasts or 



4O The Subterranean Brotherhood 

retrospects. We journeyed back, through in- 
nocent scenes of traveling life, to the smoking com- 
partment, which happened to be vacant; and under 
the consoling influence of tobacco our elder com- 
panion sought to lighten the shadows of destiny. 

" You gentlemen," he said, uttering smoke en- 
joyingly through mouth and nostrils, " don't need 
to worry none. It's like this: the judge figured 
to let you off easy. He's bound, of course, to play 
up to the statute by handin' you your bit, but, to 
start with, he cuts it down all he can, and then 
what does he do but date you back four months to 
the openin' of the trial ! All right ! After four 
months you're eligible for parole on a year and a 
day's sentence, ain't yer? Your trial began on 
November 25th, and to-day is the 24th of March. 
That means, don't it, that you make your applica- 
tion the very next thing after they gets you on the 
penitentiary register to-morrer! Why, look-a- 
here," he continued, warming to his theme, and be- 
coming, like Gladstone as depicted by Beaconsfield, 
intoxicated with the exuberance of his own ver- 
bosity, " it wouldn't surprise me, not a bit, sir, if 
you and your mate was to slip back with us on 
the train to-morrer evenin', and the whole bunch 
of us be back in little old New York along about 
Wednesday! That's right! An' what I says is, 
that ain't no punishment that's no more'n takin' 
a pleasure trip down South, at the suitable time o' 



The Road to Oblivion 41 

year! An' I guess I been on the job long enough 
to know what I'm talkin' about! " 

We guessed he knew that he was talking benevo- 
lent fictions; and yet there was plausibility in his 
argument. The law did not allow parole on sen- 
tences of a year or under, but on anything over 
one year, a convict was eligible, and our sentence 
of twenty-four hours over the twelvemonth there- 
fore brought us within this provision. In impos- 
ing that extra day, the judge could hardly have 
been motived by anything except the intention to 
open this door to us; and although the regular 
meeting of the parole board at the prison was not 
due just then, we were informed that an extra 
meeting might be summoned at any time. The 
board consisted of the warden of the prison, the 
doctor, and the official who presided at all parole 
board meetings at the various federal penitentiaries 
throughout the country, Robert La Dow. The 
law declares that a majority of the board decides 
the applications that come before it; and as two 
members of the board make a quorum, it seemed 
obvious that the warden and the doctor of At- 
lanta Penitentiary would serve our turn if they 
wanted to. Mr. LaDow, of course, might be ap- 
pealed to by telegraph if expedient. 

Turning the thing over, therefore, with the 
cozening rogue in front of us drawing our atten- 
tion to the buttered side as often as it appeared, 



42 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

we could hardly avoid the conclusion that there 
was a possibility of his being right. We might 
be required to remain in Atlanta barely long 
enough to don a suit of prison clothing and to 
have our bertillons made, and forthwith make a 
triumphal return home, with our scarlet sins 
washed white as snow. Of such an imprisonment 
it might be said, as wrote the poet of the baby 
that died at birth, 

" If it so soon was to be done for, 
One wonders what it was begun for," 

but it would not be the first thing that we had no- 
ticed in Federal administration of justice which 
might have been similarly criticized. 

My allusion to this subject here rs only by way 
of leit-motif for a thorough discussion hereafter. 
The juggling with the parole law, by the Depart- 
ment of Justice and the parole boards, is one of 
the most indefensible and cruel practical jokes that 
u the authorities " play upon prisoners. It caused 
two deaths by slow torture while I was at Atlanta, 
as shall be shown in the proper place ; and there is 
no reason to suppose that the percentage at other 
prisons was not as large or larger. The sufferings 
short of death that are due to it cannot be cal- 
culated. A practical joke? yes; but there is a 
practical purpose back of it. The miserable men 
who are practised upon by this means, helpless but 
hoping, are led to believe that they may buy free- 



The Road to Oblivion 43 

dom at the price of treachery to their fellows. 
Can it be credited that a convict in his cell, with 
perhaps years of living death before him, you 
do not yet know what that means, but if I live to 
tell this story, you will be able to guess at its sig- 
nificance before we part will refuse the oppor- 
tunity offered to end it at once in return for merely 
speaking one or two names? a convict a crea- 
ture outlawed, crushed, damned, dehumanized, 
despised, can we look from him for a heroism, 
a martyrdom, which might shed fresh honor on the 
highest name in the community? I confess that I 
would not have looked for it a year ago, and I 
doubt whether you look for it now. But I have 
to report, with joy in the goodness and selflessness 
in men whom you and I have presumed to look 
down upon, that in very few instances that I have 
heard of, and in almost none that I know, has a 
convict thus terribly tempted even hesitated to an- 
swer NO ! But many an old and cherished 
prejudice will begin painfully to gnaw its way out 
of your complacent mind before we are done. 

The City of Brotherly Love flickered by and 
was left behind, like the sentiment which it once 
stood for. We were headed for Washington, 
where the will and conscience of the nation take 
form and pass into effect. Government of the 
people by lawyers, for lawyers ; did they know what 
they were doing? The Constitution, bulwark of 
our liberties; the letter of the law, technicalities, 



44 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

precedents, procedure, the right of the individual 
merged in the public right, and lost there! The 
House five hundred turbulent broncos, each 
neighing for his own bin ; the Senate four score 
portentous clubmen, adjusting the conservative 
shirt-front of dignity and moderation over the li- 
cense of privilege and " the interests " ; the Ex- 
ecutive dillydallying between nonentity and the 
Big Stick; the Supreme Court a handful of 
citizens and participators in our common human na- 
ture, magically transmuted into omniscient and 
omnipotent gods by certificates of appointment! 
And the rest of our hundred millions, in this era 
of new discoveries and profound upheavals, on 
this battlefield of Armageddon between Hell and 
Heaven, in this crumbling of the old deities and the 
looming of the Unknown, are we to lie down 
content and docile and suffer this hybrid monster 
of Frankenstein, under guise of governing, to squat 
on our necks, bind our Titan limbs, bandage our 
awakening eyes, gag our free voices, sterilize our 
civic manhood, and debase us from sons of divine 
liberty into the underpinning of an oligarchy? 

My friend and I while our licensed pro- 
prietors napped with one eye open smiled to 
each other perhaps, recognizing how the prick of 
personal injury and injustice will arouse far-reach- 
ing rebellion against human wrongs and imperfec- 
tions in general. But our famous American sense 
of humor may be worked overtime, and, from a 



The Road to Oblivion 45 

perception of the incongruity and relative impor- 
tance of things, be insensibly degraded into pusil- 
lanimous indifference to everything, good or bad. 
The soberest observer may concede that there is 
a spiritual energy and movement behind visible 
phenomena, whose purport and aim it is the 
province of the wise to understand. The peril of 
Armageddon lies in the fact that evil never fights 
fair, but ever masks itself in the armor of good. 
Not only so, but good may be changed into evil by 
hasty and misdirected application, and do more 
harm because unsuspected than premeditated 
evil itself. Public endowment of chosen persons 
with power is good and necessary in our form of 
civilization, and the chosen ones may accept it in 
good faith. But in a community where everybody 
has business of his own to mind, and is put to it 
so to conduct it as to keep off the poor rates, 
deputed powers, designed to be limited, always 
tend to become absolute. It is heady wine, too, 
and intoxicates those who partake of it. And it is 
only a seeming paradox that absolute and irre- 
sponsible power is more apt to develop in a de- 
mocracy than under any other form of human as- 
sociation. Holders of it, moreover, instead of 
fighting for supremacy among themselves, and thus 
annulling their own mischievousness, as would at a 
first glance seem likely, soon learn the expediency 
of agreeing together; each keeps to his own area 
of despotism, cooperating, not interfering with the 



46 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

rest. But the system inevitably takes the form of 
rings within rings, each interior one possessing 
progressively superior dominion. At last we come 
to a central and small group of men who are truly 
absolute, and are supported and defended in their 
stronghold by the self-interested loyalty of the 
rest. But they do not proclaim their supremacy; 
on the contrary, they hide it under clever inter- 
pretations of law, and, at need, by securing the 
ena'ctment o-f other laws fitted to the exigency of 
the occasion. If there is remonstrance or revolt 
among their subjects, they subdue it partly by 
pointing out that it is the law, and not themselves, 
that is responsible ; and partly by employing other 
legal forms to put down the resistance. You 
cannot catch them ; they vanish under your grasp as 
principles, not men. Their voice is never heard 
saying, " I will ! " but always, " The law requires." 
And these autocrats this oligarchy are only 
men like ourselves, with like passions, limitations 
and sinful inheritance. They were not born to the 
purple they just happened to get to it. But 
being possessed of it and apart of course from 
any crude and obvious malfeasance in office they 
cannot be "legally" dislodged; and if they step 
aside, it is only to let alter egos take their place. 
The King of England the Emperor of Germany 
can be deposed by the people, and his head cut 
off; but the free and independent but law-abid- 
ing citizens of the United States cannot throw 



The Road to Oblivion 47 

off this subtle tyranny, because it is identified with 
legal provisions which we have insensibly allowed 
to creep into the inmost and most personal fibers 
of our lives. As for modifying or abolishing the 
law itself that would be anarchy ! 

It would be foolish to contend that our rulers 
are actuated by any personal malevolence or even, 
at first, by unlawful personal ambition; they are, 
as I have said, for the most part lawyers, and law 
is their fetish their magical cure-all and philoso- 
pher's stone. They almost persuade themselves, 
perhaps, that we the people make the laws; 
whereas not more than one man in ten thousand 
even of lawyers knows what the law in any 
given case is, nor would the majority of us ap- 
prove any particular law, if we were afforded the 
chance. Any one of us will support the law 
against his enemy, but not, in behalf of his enemy, 
against himself. But our legalized sultans and 
satraps, Councils of Ten and Grand Inquisitors, 
keep an easy conscience; the Law is King and can 
do no wrong. A few centuries ago it was law in 
England to kill a man for taking any personal 
liberties; there was not much harm in that, for 
most of the persons that counted were above the 
law, being nobles or gentlemen. But our way is 
far more injurious; if a man takes a personal 
liberty, the cry is, Put him in jail! Death is a 
penalty which only disposes of a man forever; but 
jail is poisonous; the man survives, but he becomes 



48 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

criminal, and an enemy of society. And this cry 
for jail does not appear to emanate from legal 
tribunals merely, but we the people ourselves have 
caught it up, and invoke cells and chains' for the 
lightest infraction of public or personal con- 
venience ; nay, we clamor for more laws to supple- 
ment our already overburdened statute-books. 
Thus do we thoughtlessly strengthen the hands of 
our masters. The nostrum which they manufac- 
tured to govern us withal, and which at first had to 
be administered to us willy-nilly, has now become 
like that notorious patent medicine for which the 
children cry. We kiss the rod as long as it is 
laid across our fellows' backs and not our own. 
And the rule of Law, by lawyers, for lawyers, 
shows no signs of vanishing from our earth. Only 
convicts and ex-convicts dissent; for they know 
what they dissent from. As an unidentified friend 
wrote to me of late, " No thief ere felt the halter 
draw, With good opinion of the law " ; but the 
thief had reason on his side. And it may yet come 
to pass that his reasons may be listened to. 

Darkness set in as we entered the sacred soil 
of Virginia; night lay before us our next night 
would be spent inside penitentiary walls. Was it 
a dream, or would some cosmic cataclysm occur 
in season to prevent it? No: the ancient routine 
of one fact after another, of cause and effect, 
would keep on with no regard for our sensibilities ; 
however important we might appear to ourselves, 



The Road to Oblivion 49 

we were but specks infinitesimal in the vast scheme 
of things. Miracles and special providences are 
for story books; if you are the victim of abuses, 
be sure that the remedy will come not through 
averting them, but by carrying them out to the 
finish. On the morning of his execution, it seemed 
incredible that Charles I should be beheaded; but 
he mounted the scaffold, laid his head upon the 
block, and the masked man lifted his sword and 
cut it off. All that is left for you is not to falter 
to keep down that tremor and sickening of the 
heart; when Danton of the French Revolution 
reached the guillotine, he was heard to mutter, 
"Danton, no weakness!" And many an un- 
recorded D-anton, on the night before his appointed 
death, has lain down and slept soundly. It re- 
curred to my memory that my father, shortly be- 
fore his death, had said to an old friend of his, 
" I trust in Julian." On the day following his 
death, that friend had journeyed to Concord to 
tell me those words returning to Boston im- 
mediately. My father's son had lived to be pro- 
claimed a felon; but I slept sound that night. 

All next day we were passing through the raw 
red soil of the South, with its cotton plantations, 
forlorn at this season, its omnipresent idle negroes, 
and its white folks, lean and solemn, standing 
guard over what fate had left to them. At 
stopping places we would step out for a few 
minutes on the platform of the observation-car, 



50 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

to breathe the air and feel the sunshine, the af- 
fectionate deputies close at our elbows. Some of 
our fellow passengers were bound for Florida or 
Cuba, to escape the crudity of the northern^ March; 
" May be we'll meet up again there ! " some of 
them said, innocently unsuspicious of what sort of 
characters they were addressing. Paradise and 
the Pit travel side by side on this earth, and find 
each other very tolerable company. 

Into Atlanta station the train at last rolled ; the 
journey to oblivion was all but finished. The rest- 
less little city, turmoiling in its boom, swarmed 
around us ; we had to wait half an hour, our grip- 
sacks in our hands, for the surface-car to the 
prison, three miles or more beyond the town. We 
awaited it with some impatience such is the 
unreasonableness of our mortal nature. At last 
we were rumbling off on our trip of twenty minutes, 
sitting unnoticed in the midway seats, our con- 
siderate but careful guardians on the watch at the 
front and rear platforms. The car took its time; 
it stopped, started again, stopped, started, after 
the manner of ordinary cars; oh, for a magic car- 
pet or pneumatic tube, to make an end of this ! or 
for a thousand years ! It was as if the headsman 
were making preliminary flourishes with his sword, 
ere delivering his blow. These were difficult 
minutes. 

They ended; " Here we are! " We alighted, 
and advanced to the entrance of an expanse of 



The Road to Oblivion 51 

ornamental grounds, with a cement pathway lead- 
ing up to an extensive fortified structure a wall 
thirty feet high sweeping to right and left from 
the tall steel gateway, with the summits of stone 
towers emerging beyond. I stepped out briskly, in 
advance of the others; I noticed some bright-hued 
flowers in a bed on the right. In a few moments 
I was ascending a wide flight of steps; as I did 
so, the gateway yawned, and two men in uniform 
stepped out. There was a transient halt, a few 
words were exchanged; we went forward, and the 
gate closed behind us. 



IV 
INITIATION 

"T)UT the fear of God in his heart! " 

J7 This phrase, impious and ironic, is used 
by officials in prisons, and repeated by prisoners. 
It has no religious import. The naming of God 
in that connection reminds me of a remark I 
heard from a moonshiner as the distillers of 
illicit whiskey in the mountain regions of the 
South are called who had lately arrived at the 
penitentiary. He said, " I allus thought this here 
Jesus Christ was a cuss-word; but these folks say 
he was some religious guy ! " His enlightenment 
was doubtless due to the first aid to the unregen- 
erate administered by our chaplain. 

To " put the fear of God in a man's heart " 
means to break his spirit, to cow him, to make 
him, from a man, a servile sneak; and this is ef- 
fected not by encouraging him to remember his 
Creator, but by instilling into him dread of the 
club, the dungeon, and the bullet. He must 
learn to fear not God, but the warden, the cap- 
tain and the guard. He is to be hustled about, 
cuffed, shoved, kicked, put in the hole, punished 
for not comprehending surly and half inarticulate 

52 



Initiation 53 

orders, or for not understanding gestures without 
words; all of which encouragements to obedience 
are, indeed, specifically forbidden by the rules 
which were formulated in Washington and dis- 
seminated for the information of the investiga- 
tion committees and of the public, but which are 
disregarded nevertheless by the prison authorities 
from the highest to the lowest. For they risk 
nothing by disregarding them; there is no one ex- 
cept prisoners to complain of illegal treatment, 
and there is no one for them to complain to ex- 
cept the very persons who are guilty of the 
illegalities; and the warden at Atlanta, at any rate, 
has repeatedly stated that he would not accept 
the oaths of any number of prisoners against the 
unsupported denial of a single guard. To do 
otherwise would be to " destroy discipline." 
Moreover, these unverified complaints such is 
their inevitable category in the circumstances 
are themselves fresh causes of offense, and pro- 
ductive of the severest punishments not only 
clubbing and close confinement, often in the dark 
hole, but loss of good time, which of course is 
more dreaded than anything else. 

But may not the prisoners complain to the 
committees or inspectors, appointed precisely to 
enquire into and relieve abuses of this sort? 

I shall have a good deal to say about these 
agents of humanity presently. I will only say 
here that no prisoner who cares whether he lives 



54 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

or dies, or who possesses common sense or the 
smallest smattering of experience of prison affairs, 
ever is so reckless as to impart any facts to the 
persons in question. If he accuses any^guard or 
other official of cruelty, the entire force of prison 
keepers can and will be at need marshaled to deny 
point-blank that any such thing occurred, or, if 
any did, it was because the accused official was at 
the time quelling a dangerous revolt, and deemed 
his own life in peril. If this evidence be insuffi- 
cient, it is a pathetic truth that some prisoners 
can always be found so debased by terror and 
abject as to perjure themselves against their com- 
rades. It is among negro prisoners that such 
traitors are commonly sought and found. White 
men uniformly have a sense of honor thieves' 
honor, if you please which keeps them loyal. 
There are exceptions to this rule, and there 
are also exceptions to the rule that negroes 
betray. I have the pleasure and the honor of 
the acquaintance of some negro prisoners at At- 
lanta who would sooner die than ingratiate them- 
selves with the officials by a falsehood. 

Accordingly, complaints of brutal treatment at 
Atlanta are not frequent, either to the officials or 
to investigators; otherwise, I need not tax your 
imagination to picture what happens to the com- 
plainants after the investigators have departed. 
Order and discipline as appertaining to pris- 
oners, not to officials must be preserved; of 



Initiation 55 

course they must, if we are to have any prisons at 
all. And since there is no way for the prisoners 
to compel the guards to keep within the license 
accorded to them, we must compel the prisoners 
to accept whatever injustice or outrage the unre- 
strained despots of the ranges have the whim to 
inflict upon them. There are desperate revolts 
at times desperate in the literal sense, since 
they have no hope of relief in them, but only the 
tragic rage against tyranny which will sometimes 
blaze up in victims and on the other hand there 
are officials who will resign their positions rather 
than connive at abuses. But every means is taken 
to avert this last; for guards know things, and 
the System could be shaken by men who not only 
know, but, unlike prisoners, have a chance to make 
what they know believed. 

All this time we have been waiting just inside 
the prison gates. The difference between just in- 
side and just outside is important; for nine con- 
victed men out of ten, it would be punishment for 
their misdeeds more than sufficient to be taken no 
further on the way to retribution than that. 
Whatever humiliation and disgrace they are cap- 
able of feeling or have cause to feel is at that first 
moment at its height; it strikes upon them unac- 
customed and defenseless never so acutely sen- 
sitive as then. Afterward, familiarity with misery 
and shame renders them progressively more and 
more callous, without adding one jot to the public 



56 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

odium of their position. They can never forget 
that first clang of the closing gates in their ears; 
the whole significance of penal imprisonment is in 
that. Many a man, the moment after that experi- 
ence, might turn round and go forth a free man, 
yet with a soul charged with all the mortal burden 
that man-devised penalties can inflict upon him. 
Moreover, not having been unmanned and his 
nature violated by physical insults and outrages, 
he might find strength and spirit to begin and 
pursue a better life thereafter. The " lesson " 
(word which our shallow and officious moralists 
roll so sweetly under their tongues) would have 
been taught him to the last tittle,, and withal 
enough of the man remain to profit by it. 
Whereas, under the existing conditions, no more 
than four or five years in jail destroy any possi- 
bility of future usefulness in most men ; they have 
been hammered into something helpless, dazed, 
or monstrous; and even if they have courage to 
attempt to take hold of life again, they are de- 
feated by the unremitting pursuit of our spy sys- 
tem, which depends for the main part of its 
livelihood upon getting ex-convicts back to jail 
whether on sound or on perjured evidence is all 
one to the spies. So, as I said some time ago, 
most prison sentences are life sentences, to all 
practical intents. To the manhood of the man, 
prison means death. 

Do some of the above statements appear ex- 



Initiation 57 

treme? Read on, and decide. Meanwhile I will 
observe that so long as prisons endure, such abuses 
as have been hinted at must persist. Whatever 
reforms have in special instances ameliorated 
them, have in so far only gone to show that the 
whole system is vicious and irrational. 

My friend and I looked at our new masters 
with curiosity; they looked at us with what might 
be termed arch amusement. With such a look 
do small boys regard the beetles, kittens, or other 
animals, power to torment whom has been given 
them. It was after prison hours the men had 
been already locked in their cells, and the warden 
and deputy had gone home. It was left to the 
subordinates to put the fear of God in our hearts; 
we could only surmise how far they would go in 
that instruction. We did not then know that their 
power was limited only by their good pleasure. 
But it is an accepted and reasonable principle with 
them that the sooner one begins to take the non- 
sense out a prisoner, the better. The strange- 
ness of his surroundings intimidates him at the 
start, and he more readily realizes that he has no 
friends and that he is in prison not (as one of 
the guards afterward took occasion to remark) 
in a " sanitarium for decayed crooks." A good 
scare thrown into him now will bring forth more 
fruit than greater pains taken and inflicted 
hereafter. 

Our anticipations, however, were the less for- 



58 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

midable, because we had been exhaustively as- 
sured during the past ten days that Atlanta 
Penitentiary was not so much a penitentiary as 
a sort of gentlemen's summer resort and club, 
where conditions were ideal and treatment almost 
foolishly humane and tender. This information 
came not only from all court officials with whom 
we had held communion on the subject, but from 
our own counsel at the trial; the judge himself 
seemed to believe it, and if you ask the prison 
authorities at Atlanta, they will earnestly assure 
you that prisoners there are treated like gentle- 
men, are given every material comfort consistent 
with their being prisoners at all, are sumptuously 
fed and housed, and are helped in all ways to build 
up their manhood, maintain their self-respect, and 
prepare themselves for a career, after liberation, 
as valuable and industrious citizens. We were 
naturally disposed to credit assertions so emphat- 
ically and variously made, some basis for them 
there must be. And it was obvious, at a glance, 
that the corridor in which we stood was spacious 
and airy, with a clean limestone pavement; that 
the disorder and shiftlessness of the Tombs was 
absent here. The guards who attended us wore 
/neat dark uniforms of military cut; and if their 
caps were tilted back on their heads, or cocked on 
the northeast corner, that was a pardonable ex- 
pression of their authority and importance. I 
saw no firearms and no blood, nor were the groans 



Initiation 59 

of tortured convicts audible. I remembered the 
flowers in the garden outside, and was prone to 
think that things might have been very much 
worse ; they were certainly better, at a first glance, 
than at Sing Sing, which I had visited on a news- 
paper assignment about fifteen years before. I 
had resolved beforehand to make the best of 
everything, and it seemed already possible that 
I might not have to make believe very much to 
do so. 

No resolve, however, could overcome the in- 
fluence of that locked and barred gate, nor the 
realization that I was a convict, and that nobody 
inside the penitentiary had any doubt that I was 
justly convicted. Friends were remote and help- 
less; the support of former good repute was an- 
nulled; I stood there impotent, one man against 
the Federal Government, with nothing to aid me 
but the weight of my personal equation (what- 
ever that might be worth) and my private atti- 
tude on the question of my guilt, which the trial 
had not modified, but which could be of no prac- 
tical benefit to me here. The sensation of con- 
fronting everywhere a settled and hostile 
skepticism as to one's integrity was novel, and 
hard to meet with a firm countenance. And I 
felt how easily this sensation might crush the 
courage of one who was conscious of being justly 
condemned. How many men must be sitting yon- 
der in those cells who lacked the moral consola- 



60 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

tions that I had! The thought sharpened my 
perception of the horror of all imprisonment, but 
at the same time stiffened my fortitude; for if 
these men could live through their ordeal, how 
much more could I ! 

Meanwhile we were being hurried through the 
handsome corridor, and down a flight of iron steps 
to a less presentable region. There was no ag- 
gressive brutality, only a peremptory curtness, en- 
tirely proper in the circumstances. Our only 
defense against physical severity was a bearing 
of cheerful but not overdone courtesy, and we 
gave that what play we might. I could not fore- 
tell how I might behave under a clubbing, and 
would not bring the thing to a test, if I could 
decently avoid it. In a long, low, shabby, ill- 
lighted room we were lined up against a counter, 
on the other side of which were two or three of 
our fellow prisoners the first we had seen 
whose function it was to fit us with prison suits. 
They consisted of a sack coat and trousers of 
gray-blue cloth rather heavy goods, for the 
warm season had not yet begun and this was 
obviously far from being their first appearance on 
a convict; suits are handed down from one genera- 
tion of prisoners to another until they are entirely 
worn out ; my own was of an ancient vintage and a 
good deal defaced, but I had no ambition to be 
a glass of fashion in jail. Of course I could only 
conjecture what diseases previous wearers of it 



Initiation 6l 

might have suffered from; but I hoped for the best. 
Every new arrival at the penitentiary is pre- 
sumed to be dirty until he is proved clean, and the 
only way for him to prove his bodily purity is to 
submit to a bath. The regulation is commenda- 
ble, and was welcome to us after our day and 
night in the train; but a comrade of mine from the 
mountain wildernesses of South Carolina, where 
bathing is still regarded as a degrading innova- 
tion, described to me long afterward what a sturdy 
battle he had put up against the disgrace, and 
being a lusty youth, it had taken the best efforts 
of several guards to hold him under the spout long 
enough to wet him and themselves into the bar- 
gain. Though this was the first time since infancy 
that I had bathed under compulsion, I complied 
very readily, and even said to my friend, " This 
isn't so bad ! " It is not permitted, under the law, 
to give out any news about prisoners to the world 
without, after they have once passed the portals; 
nevertheless, this memorable remark of mine was 
printed next day in the New York newspapers, to- 
gether with the scarlet hue of my necktie, and 
some other details, my registered prison number 
among them, my own first knowledge of which was 
derived from the published paragraph. It was my 
first intimation of a fact which afterward exer- 
cised no small influence on my destiny in the prison 
that I was a " distinguished," or at least a no- 
torious prisoner. This influence had its good as 



62 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

well as its bad aspect, in the long run, but the latter 
was in the beginning the more conspicuous. The 
unidentified press-agent who disseminated to an 
eager world the news about the bath and the neck- 
tie, continued to be active during our stay in At- 
lanta, but his other communications were not even 
approximately so accurate as the first one, and 
nearly all of them were children of his imagination 
exclusively, and were more likely to be gratifying 
to the officials than to my fellow prisoner and my- 
self. 

From the bath to the bedchamber. Up the 
darksome stairs again into the stately corridor; 
through an inner gateway, and into a wide hall 
which communicated to right and left, through 
small steel doors, with the west and east ranges 
( dormitories) . The west door was unlocked, and 
we were pushed into a huge room, about two hun- 
dred feet by a hundred and twenty, with tall barred 
windows along each side. Inside this space had 
been constructed a sort of inner house of steel, 
seven or eight stories in height, with zig-zag stair- 
ways at either end, leading to narrow platforms 
that opened on the individual cell doors. These 
doors were barred, and were locked by throwing 
a switch at the near end of the ranges; but any 
particular door could also be opened by a key. 
The cell doors of the inner structure were at a 
distance of some twenty feet from the walls and 
windows of the outer shell, and got what light and 



Initiation 63 

air they had from these none too much of 
course. Also, the guard on duty in the range, if 
the weather be chilly, will close the windows, 
against the protests of the prisoners, and against 
the regulations too; but most of the guards are 
thin-blooded Southerners, and diseased into the 
bargain, and do not like cold air. The conse- 
quence is that the four hundred pairs of lungs in 
each range soon vitiate the atmosphere; the 
prisoners turn and toss in their cots, have bad 
dreams, and rise in the morning with a headache. 
We mounted three or four flights of iron steps, 
and were introduced into a cell near the corner. It 
was, like all the others, a steel box about eight feet 
long by five wide, and seven or eight high. On one 
side, two cots two feet wide were hinged against 
the wall, one above another; they reduced the liv- 
ing space to a breadth of three feet. The wall 
opposite was made of plain plates of steel, and 
so was the inner end of the cell, but in this, at a 
man's height from the floor, was a round hole an 
inch in diameter. That was a part of the spy 
system ; for between the two rows of cells is a nar- 
row passage, in which the guard can walk, and, 
himself unseen and unheard, spy upon the prisoners 
and listen to their conversation. All prisoners 
are at all times of the day and night under observa- 
tion. This seems a slight thing; but the cumula- 
tive effect of it upon men's minds is disintegrating. 
At no moment of their lives can they command the 



64 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

slightest privacy. And what right to privacy, you 
ask, has a prisoner? Would he not use it to cut 
his way through the chilled steel walls with his 
teeth and nails, or to plot revolt with his cell- 
mate? -Possibly; but even a beast seeks privacy 
at certain junctures; and to deny all privacy tends 
to bestialize human beings. It is a part of the 
" put-the-fear-of-God-in-his-heart " principle to 
break, humiliate, degrade the man, and render him 
unfit for human association. There are a wash- 
basin and a toilet seat at the foot of the cot, facing 
the barred door. What difference can it make to 
a convict if the guard, or any other passer-by, 
watches him while he uses them ? 

There had been issued to us sheets, a pillow- 
case, and a gray blanket of the army sort; our first 
duty was to make our beds. Mattress and pillow 
were stuffed stiff with what felt like wood chips, 
and was probably straw and corn-husks ; the pillow 
was cylindrical ; the mattress was hillocked and hol- 
lowed by the uneasy struggles with insomnia of 
countless former users. There was a campstool 
whose luxuries we might share. We had, each, a 
prison toothbrush, and a comb. In the ceiling of 
the cell, beyond reach of an outstretched arm, was 
an electric bulb which would be darkened at nine 
o'clock. But all this was welcome; I had often 
roughed it in conditions quite as severe ; my spirits 
could not be dashed by mere hardships or incon- 
veniences. We put our domestic menage in order 



Initiation 65 

cheerfully, glad that we had been celled together, 
instead of doubling up with strangers. Nor would 
it have discouraged us to know that the west range 
was the one occupied by negroes and dangerous 
characters. The place was silent; none of the 
demoniac chantings and hyena laughter of the 
Tombs. We had our little jests and chucklings 
as we made our arrangements; Courage, Com- 
rade! the period of suspense and anticipation is 
passed ; we are at grips with the reality now I 

Moreover " Every prisoner, on installation in 
his cell, is supplied with rolls and hot coffee, and 
with pipe and tobacco ! " Thus would the state- 
ment run in the report to the Department. What 
if the bread be uneatable, the coffee undrinkable, 
and the tobacco unsmokable? The mere idea of 
such things is something; besides, prisoners do con- 
trive, being hard put to it, to consume them. We 
ourselves at least tried all three ; if it proved easier 
to be abstinent than self-indulgent, that was our 
own affair. Meanwhile, our mental appetites 
were appeased by a little gray pamphlet, contain- 
ing the rules governing the conduct of convicts in 
the penitentiary. There were a great many of 
them, and not a few required thought to penetrate 
their significance. Why, for instance, should spe- 
cial emphasis be laid upon the injunction to rest 
one's shoes against the bars of the door upon re- 
tiring? We were never informed; but I presume 
it must have been to prevent a man being tempted 



66 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

to reach out an arm a hundred feet long through 
his bars, throw the switch, steal along the platform, 
open the steel door, unbar the two outer gates, 
climb over the thirty-four foot wall, and escape 
all the while avoiding the notice of the range guard, 
of the guards in the corridors, and of the watch- 
man on the tower outside, all of whom were armed 
with magazine rifles and were yearning for an 
opportunity to use them. Of course, he would 
want to have on his shoes for such an enterprise, so 
that if the shoes were visible inside his door, it was 
prima facie evidence that he himself was also 
within. Another rule was italicized " Do not 
try to escape you might get hurt! " I refrained 
from testing the validity of either prohibition. 

In the midst of our perusal, we were interrupted 
by the arrival of a visitor. He was a slight-built, 
slope-shouldered young fellow, in prison garb, with 
a meager visage heavily furrowed with sickness 
and suffering he had tuberculosis, chronic bron- 
chitis, and the indigestion with which all prisoners 
who eat the regular prison fare are afflicted. Not 
that Ned (as I will call him, since it was not his 
name) mentioned his condition; it was determined 
long afterward by the diagnosis of my friend; 
Ned's object in visiting us was not to air his own 
troubles, but to assuage, so far as he might, the 
gloom and uneasiness of the new arrivals. In his 
haggard face shone a pair of very intelligent and 
kindly gray eyes, and above them rose a compact, 



Initiation 67 

well-filled forehead. I was fortunate enough to 
keep in touch with this young man during my stay, 
and I found no more lovable nature in the peni- 
tentiary. He made no secret of the fact that he 
had been guilty of a Federal offense, and he never 
expressed contrition for it; "I made a mistake 
in taking another man in with me," he remarked; 
" you are never safe unless you go it alone." He 
had not been systematically educated, but he had 
read widely and judiciously, talked correctly, 
though with occasional colloquial idioms thrown in, 
and he was a concentrated and original thinker. 
His opinions were bold, independent, and sound, 
his insight was very penetrating, and his knowl- 
edge of matters of criminal procedure and of 
prison conditions was accurate and ample. Facts 
which I afterward learned for myself were never 
out of accord with information he had given me ; 
and the sanity and clarity of his judgments were 
refreshing and remarkable. His courage was un- 
demonstrative but indomitable; he never com- 
plained of his own condition and experiences, but 
was instant in his sympathy with the misfortunes 
of others. No more welcome and valuable coun- 
selor than he could have come to us in those first 
hours of our durance. 

That he was able to visit us was due to his being 
a " runner," as those prisoners are termed who 
are assigned to carrying messages and doing odd 
jobs in the ranges. He leaned against the bars 



68 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

and spoke manfully and pungently, with touches of 
gay humor now and then; advised us to our con- 
duct what to do and what to avoid; and when 
he noticed the little gray pamphlet, said scorn- 
fully, " Don't muss up your ideas with that ! 
There's a hundred rules there, and every one of 
'em is broken every day. Those rules are for 
show; what happens to you depends on who the 
guard is, and how he happens to be feeling. You 
can go as far as you like sometimes, and other 
times you'll get hauled up if you turn your head 
sideways. The screw" (guard) "on this range 
is decent; he won't crowd you too much. Keep 
quiet, and do what they tell you, and the odds are 
you'll get by all right. Of course, if some fellow 
gets a grudge against you, he's liable to hammer 
you like hell; there are some prisoners here that 
get on the wrong side of a screw, and well, it 
goes hard with 'em! But if you're a little care- 
ful, I guess you'll get through all right. 

" I've read all about your case in the papers, 
and I know you oughtn't to be here ; and Bill " (the 
Warden) " likely knows it too, and as folks on the 
outside are on the watch for what happens to you, 
he'll think twice how he treats you. Bill is a cun- 
ning one; he keeps his ear to the ground; when he 
sees that the reform people are going to put some- 
thing across, he backs it up, and gives out that he 
suggested it himself; but up to a year or two ago, 
he did the worst sort of things to the men; even in 



Initiation 69 

his early reports and addresses he advocated treat- 
ment that he'd never dare stand for now except 
on the quiet! He gets himself written up in the 
local papers here as the model warden warm- 
hearted and broad-minded, and all that flap-doo- 
dle ! But if he had his way, you'd think you were 
back in the dark ages in this penitentiary. Wick- 
ersham threw a bit of a scare into him a couple 
of years back; and there have been others; but 
most of the inspectors that are sent here stand in 
with him; he gives them good feeds in his house, 
and takes them out in his auto, and fills 'em up 
with soft talk about * his boys,' and his fatherly 
interest in 'em, and all that but he keeps the 
dark cells and the rest of the dirty work out of 
their sight, and of course none of the men dares 
say anything to 'em it would be all day with 
them if they did as soon as the inspector turned 
his back. That's what gets the men's goat that 
he puts up such a humane front, and all the while 
hammers them on the sly. They'd prefer being 
told at the start they were going to get hell, and 
then getting it; but it goes against their grain to 
get it, and meantime have folks outside believe 
they're in a gentlemen's country club ! " 

Ned imparted his information by fits and starts; 
ever and anon he would break off abruptly and 
walk off down the range, to give the guard the idea 
that he was about his ordinary business; then he 
would return, squat down on his hams beside the 



70 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

door, and murmur along in his rapid, distinct tones. 
All that he said was abundantly confirmed later. 

Finally " Good night sleep well they'll 
put you on some job in a few days; it'"s the first 
days that go hardest with most men, but you'll get 
used to it; you might get out on parole, too but 
don't count on it; of all the frauds in this prison, 
parole is the worst! And if they ever pass that 
1 Indeterminate Sentence ' law good-by ! Im- 
agine Bill with that thing to use as a club over us ! 
He'd make every other man here a lifer! " 

He laughed in the prison way silently, in his 
throat and went away, after warning us that it 
was near nine o'clock. Our watches had been taken 
away from us ; no doubt, a prisoner might commit 
suicide by sticking his watch in his windpipe, or he 
could bribe a guard with it to bring him cigarette 
papers, or " dope." Besides, what has a man in 
jail to do with time? Our warm-hearted and 
fatherly masters desire their charges to exist so far 
as practical in a dead, unmeasured monotony, 
where a minute may seem to prolong itself to the 
dimensions of an hour; to feel themselves utterly 
severed from the world they have annoyed or in- 
jured. That is the penitentiary ideal; but it has 
of late become impossible fully to realize it. A 
prison will always be a prison; but at any rate, 
light shall be let in on it. 

Meanwhile, our cell light went out; and we 
waited for the dawn 



ROUTINE 

I LAY in the upper bunk. It was a six-foot 
drop to the cement floor below. The mat- 
tress, though irregularly dented and bulged, was 
upon the whole convex, and not over two feet wide. 
A vertical fence or bastion, six or eight inches 
high, along the outer brink of this precipice would 
have averted the danger of rolling off in the night; 
but nothing of the sort had been provided. One 
must remember not to roll, even in the nightmare. 
Convicts educate the subliminal self to a surprising 
degree, and do not fall victims to this trap as often 
as one would expect; but occasionally one of them 
forgets, and down he comes, sometimes getting 
bruised only, but generally with a broken bone or 
so. I do not have nightmares, and I lay prone, 
gripping the sides of the mattress with my knees, 
as if it were a bucking broncho. So I journeyed, 
Mazeppa-wise, through the abysses of that first 
night, and was not unhorsed. 

Light glimmered obscurely through the bars of 
the cell from the night-burner below. Odd sounds 
broke out at intervals. Half suppressed coughs, 
sudden, brief cries, irregular wheezings and gur- 

71 



72 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

glings, due to defective plumbing, occasionally a 
few muttered words ; then a man in an upper tier 
began to moan and groan dismally a negro with 
a colic, perhaps. Long, dead silences would be 
interrupted by inexplicable noises. In the dead 
vast and middle of the night the prisoner in the 
cell over mine began to pace up and down his floor, 
eighteen inches above my head. Four paces one 
way, four back, over and over interminably. Who 
was he? What was he thinking about? Some- 
thing seemed to goad him intolerably; that forg- 
ing to and fro, like a tormented pendulum with a 
soul in it, gave a stifling impression, as of one 
tortured for air and space. How many years must 
he endure how many centuries ? Was his wife 
dying, his children abandoned? Up and down he 
padded; had he committed some ugly crime, for 
which he longed to atone but prison is not atone- 
ment ! Had his conviction been unjust, and was he 
raging impotently against injustice? Let him not 
rage too loudly, for there was a guard yonder, in- 
different to tortured souls, but licensed to stop 
noises. A prison is a prison, not a sanitarium for 
diseased crooks. But if the world could hear those 
footfalls, and interpret their significance, how long 
would prisons last? A jail at night is a strange 
place eight hundred men packed in together, 
each terrifyingly alone! 

Some of the earlier workers had been roused 
at six or five o'clock or earlier; but for the ma- 



Routine 73 

jority the six-thirty bell was the reveille. It 
screeched violently and was silent. The watching 
devils or the guardian angels of the night vanished, 
and up got the eight hundred members of the Gen- 
tlemen's Country Club, to live as best they might 
through one day more; coughing, hawking, spit- 
ting, murmuring but all with a sense of repres- 
sion in it, the life-sapping drug of fear in its origin, 
but long since become a mechanical habit with most 
of them. Eight hundred criminals, herded be- 
neath one roof to be cured of their crimes by in- 
different or threatening and hostile task-masters 
and irresponsible discipline-mongers, and by as- 
sociation with one another a regimen of hell to 
extirpate deviltry ! The twentieth century solu- 
tion of the problem of evil, unaltered in principle 
after thousands of years ! 

Civilization has progressed wonderfully, but al- 
ways with this death-house on its back. And the 
death-house gets bigger and more populous every 
year. Reformers, exhorters, Christian Endeavor- 
ers, humanitarians, Salvation Armies, social re- 
formers, penologists, scientific experimentalists 
with surgical apparatus, together with parole laws, 
indeterminate sentences, commutations, pardons, 
not to speak of a good warden here and there and 
a kind guard all toiling and tinkering to make 
prisons better, to sweep them, to air them, to instil 
religion and education, to supply work and exercise 
and to pay wages and all the while the tide of 



74 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

criminals gets larger and the accommodations for 
them less adequate. What can be the matter? 
Are we to end by discovering that everybody is a 
criminal, and ripe for jail? or shall we be driven 
to the realization that the fundamental idea of 
imprisonment for crime is itself the most mon- 
strous of crimes and try something else ? What 
else is there to be tried ? Are we to leave criminals 
to their liberty among the community? 

There will be time enough to discuss these rid- 
dles. It is time now to get into your prison suit, 
with its " U. S. P." on the back of the coat, and 
your number; its " U. S. P." on the back of the 
shirt, with your number; its " U. S. P." on the 
front of your trousers-legs, and your number; your 
canvas shoes and your vizored cap. But beware 
of putting on the cap within prison walls, lest the 
guard report you to the captain, the captain to the 
deputy, the deputy, if necessary, to the warden, 
and ye be cast into the inner darkness. There 
shall there be thin slices of bread, and water, and 
gnashing of teeth. 

With a guard acting as cowboy, shepherd dog, 
or convict compeller, we shuffled in a continuous 
line down the iron stairways and across the hall 
into the dining room, a cement-floored barred-win- 
dow desert sown with tables in rows, seating eight 
men each; guards with clubs standing at coigns of 
vantage or pacing up and down the aisles, and in 
one window, commanding the whole room, a guard 



Routine 75 

with a loaded rifle, licensed to shoot down any 
misbehaver. At no time and in no part of this 
model jail are you out of range of a loaded rifle, 
in the hands of men quick and skilful in their use. 
They are the sauce for meals and the encourage- 
ment to labor. But casualties seldom happen; 
when they do, they are hushed up, and the body 
of the man is buried next day in the prison grave- 
yard. 

I will postpone to a future chapter the subject 
of the dining room and what is done there. As 
we filed out, I noticed " MERRY CHRISTMAS," and 
" HAPPY NEW YEAR " emblazoned in green above 
the door. It was to remind us, perhaps, of what 
we lost by being criminals. As we debouched into 
the inner hall, separated from the corridor leading 
to the warden's office, and to freedom, by a steel- 
barred gate, we saw a guard seated in a chair with 
a rifle across his knees. Rats in a steel trap might 
have mutinied with as much hope of success as we 
at that juncture; but the guard had to be used for 
something, and convicts must not be allowed to 
forget that they are in prison. At all events we 
forbore to mutiny, and were rounded into our cells 
and locked up for half an hour, during which we 
might smoke Golden Grain tobacco, fifty per cent, 
dirt, and the rest the refuse of the weed, supplied 
to the prison by contract; or we might read, or 
comb our hair, or do calisthenics, or invoke the 
Divine blessing upon the labors of the coming day. 



76 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

The interval is really provided as a measure of se- 
curity; many of the prisoners do their work out- 
side the main buildings; but it is deemed unsafe 
to unlock the outer gates while the whole' body of 
prisoners is on the move. They might make a 
concerted rush, and get out in the yard, to be shot 
down in detail by the guards in the towers. 

Mr. Sidney Ormund, to be sure, a special writer 
on the Atlanta Constitution, makes the following 
statement in an issue of the paper shortly after I 
had left the jail and recorded my opinion that 
" Warden Moyer was unfit." " It is safe to as- 
sume," Mr. Ormund affirms, " that if all the pris- 
oners at the Atlanta federal penitentiary were life- 
termers and each had a voice in the selection of a 
warden to serve for a like term, William Moyer, 
the present incumbent a man who has done 
more to make prison life bearable than any man in 
this country would be selected without a mur- 
mur of opposition." 

That is a fine, explicit statement of Mr. Or- 
mund's, such as any warden in dire trouble and 
perplexity might be glad and proud to have a 
faithful friend make concerning him. It has no 
strings to it, and is followed up by similar senti- 
ments throughout the article. But why, in that 
case, are the gates ( into the yard locked, and the 
man with the rifle provided? If Warden Moyer 
renders life at Atlanta prison more bearable than 
at any other in the country, what conceivable 



Routine 77 

grounds are there that his affectionate inmates 
should wish to run away from him? That warm- 
hearted and big-brained gentleman would hardly 
put the Government to the expense of supplying 
safeguards against a contingency which his own 
tender and lovable nature renders unthinkable, 
even if the thirty-four foot wall outside does not 
There seems to be a non-sequitur here, which Mr. 
Ormund, perhaps, may feel inspired to clear up. 
When he has done that, it will be time to call his 
attention to a score or more other incongruities 
which a residence of only six or seven months in 
this humane institution has been sufficient to dis- 
close. 

At the expiration of the half hour, we laid aside 
our pipes, or our prayer-books, and were ready 
for the activities of the day. The others were 
detailed to their regular work; but my friend and 
I had our final rites of initiation still to undergo. 
A young official, whose countenance readily if not 
habitually assumed a sullen and menacing expres- 
sion, beckoned to us with his club, and we followed 
him downstairs to an elevator, in which he 
ascended to the upper floor, while we pursued him 
upward by way of the staircase. The cap of Mr. 
Ivy such was his poetic given name was 
worn on the extreme rear projection of his head, 
and he used his club in place of speech; not that he 
actually pummeled us with it, but by wavings and 
pointings he made it indicate his will, and kept 



78 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

us mindful how easily we might afford him a pre- 
text for putting it to its more normal use. Mr. 
Ivy, as I afterward learned, was a Southerner by 
birth, as are the majority of the guards" in the 
penitentiary, and may have been, like most of 
them, a graduate from the army. In reporting 
the case of Private George, of the U. S. Army, 
now a prisoner in stripes in the Leavenworth Peni- 
tentiary, it was stated by Mr. Gilson Gardner that 
" The common soldier in the U. S. army has no 
rights. When he enlists, he gives up the guaran- 
tees of the Constitution, the protection of jury 
trial, and even his right to petition for a redress 
of grievances. He may be unjustly charged, se- 
cretly tried and cruelly punished, and he has no 
remedy." 

As regards unjust, cruel and despotic treatment, 
the status of the U. S. soldier and of a penitentiary 
convict are on all fours, though of course the 
former has the advantage of belonging to a serv- 
ice traditionally honorable, of open air service 
and exercise in all parts of the country or abroad, 
of reasonable freedom when off duty, and of what- 
ever glory and advancement campaigning against 
an enemy may bring him. But we may readily 
perceive that a soldier who has felt the rough edge 
of discipline and finds his health broken, perhaps, 
by indiscretions incident to army life, might say 
to himself, on receiving his discharge, " I am bred 
to no trade, I am good for nothing, but I should 



Routine 79 

like to get back at somebody for the humiliations 
and hardships I have endured. Why not take a 
job as a prison guard ; the pay is only $70 a month, 
but instead of being the under dog, I shall be on 
top, licensed to bully and belabor to my heart's 
content, to insult, humiliate and berate, and to get 
away with it unscathed ! " 

For my part, I can imagine no reason more 
plausible to explain the large number of ex-soldiers 
among prison guards, and their conduct in that 
position. With some shining exceptions, they are 
petty tyrants of the worst type, sulky, sneering, 
malignant, brutal, and liars and treacherous into 
the bargain. Their mode of life in a jail, im- 
mersed in that sinister and unnatural atmosphere, 
hating and hated, with no sane or absorbing oc- 
cupation, encouraged by the jail customs to play 
the part of spies and false witnesses, ignorant and 
demoralized, tends to create evil tendencies and 
to confirm such as exist. No worse originally 
than the average of men, they are made baser 
and more savage by their circumstances. And no 
man able to hold his own in the free life and com- 
petition of the outside world, would stoop to ac- 
cept a position as guard in a jail. 

I know nothing of the private biography of Mr. 
Ivy, and it is quite possible that he may have 
possessed endearing traits which he had no op- 
portunity to manifest in our intercourse. It 
would be foolish and futile for the ends I have 



8o The Subterranean Brotherhood 

in view in this writing to cite or comment on in- 
dividuals, save as they may illustrate the point un- 
der discussion. But I am the less reluctant to 
animadvert upon this or that employee of the peni- 
tentiary, because I feel satisfied that, so far from 
compromising him with the higher prison authori- 
ties, abuse from me would only recommend him 
to their favor. Mr. Ivy, such as he was, con- 
ducted us to a bench outside a closed door, already 
partly occupied by three or four half naked con- 
victs, white and black. We gathered from his ges- 
tures of head and club that we were to remove 
our upper garments and our shoes and stockings, 
and place them on the floor in front of us. It was 
a cold morning, and the floor was of limestone. 
We obeyed instructions, and for the next twenty 
minutes sat there, objects of pardonable curiosity 
or amusement to our fellow benchers and to 
passers-by in the hall, and with nothing to keep 
us warm but the genial influences of the occasion. 
Finally, each in his turn, we were passed through 
the door into a sort of office, with clerks and Dr. 
Weaver, the prison physician, at $1500 a year, 
a tall, wooden faced young medical school 
graduate, who cultivated a skeptical expression 
and a jeering intonation of speech. He and an 
assistant put us through a physical examination, 
and took a series of measurements, all of which 
were entered by the clerks in ledgers. Our photo- 
graphs were then taken, and afterward (it was 



Routine 81 

the next day, but may as well be told here) we 
were further identified by taking the impressions 
of our finger prints, and by a second photograph 
without our mustaches these having been re- 
moved in the meantime. We were now convicts 
full-fledged and published, and our pictures were 
disseminated to every prison and penitentiary in 
the country, to be enshrined in the rogues' gallery 
and studied by all police officials. 

This may sound silly, in the case of two men 
much nearer three score and ten than three score, 
and untrained to gain a livelihood by crime. Ber- 
tillon measurements were not needed to identify 
us, nor photographs without mustaches. But, in 
the first place, prison rules apply to the mass, 
not to individuals; and secondly, it has been re- 
solved by the wisdom of our rulers that a man 
who reverts to crime after one or more convic- 
tions shall be more severely punished than a first 
offender. Nobody stops to question the logic of 
this ostensibly prudent provision. But the con- 
vict knows that his chances of making an honest 
livelihood after a conviction are many times less 
than before. Spies are on his trail at every turn, 
and if ever he succeed in securing legitimate em- 
ployment, an officer of the secret service presently 
informs his employer that he has a jail-bird on his 
pay-roll. Naturally he is promptly paid off and 
dismissed, and he may go through the same ex- 
perience as often as he is foolish enough to try 



82 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

it. But even if he be inactive, he is not safe 
far from it. He is known to the police and liable 
to arrest at any moment as a vagrant, without 
visible means of support. Nor is this all. Sup- 
pose him to be recorded in prison archives as a 
safe-blower, and that a safe is blown somewhere 
and the culprits escape. The credit of the police 
department demands that an arrest be made, if 
not of the person or persons actually guilty of 
this particular crime, then of some one who may 
be plausibly represented as guilty of it. Accord- 
ingly, our friend is apprehended and charged with 
the crime; there is his record, and it is easy to 
secure " evidence " that he was on the spot at 
the time, though he may have been, in fact, a 
hundred or two miles away from it. Detectives 
are experts at providing this sort of evidence ; and 
it frequently happens that they get the corrobora- 
tion of the victim himself by assuring him that, 
if he will confess, the judge will let him off with a 
light sentence, whereas if he prove " stubborn," 
it will go hard with him a matter of ten years 
or so. Ten years in jail for something you did 
not do! Six months or a year if you confess! 
Perjury is wrong no doubt; but, were you who 
read this placed in that predicament, which horn 
of the dilemma would you select? If you have 
never served an actual jail term, you might virtu- 
ously hesitate ; but it is the world against a mustard 
seed that you wouldn't hesitate if you had. The 



Routine 83 

crisp of the joke is, however, and of course 
it serves you right, that the judge, after all, 
gives you the ten years, and that means life, for 
you will never be long out of jail afterward. As 
I write this, I have in mind several instances of it 
among my personal acquaintances at Atlanta. 

If then our convict, upon his release, cannot 
keep himself in any honest employment, and can- 
not avoid arrest even when he is doing nothing at 
all, good or bad, it seems plain that he must 
either hunt out a quiet place where he may starve 
to death before the officer can arrest him for starv- 
ing, or commit suicide in some more sudden and 
active manner, or he must accept the opportunity 
which is always at hand in " revert to a career of 
crime/' as the saying is. Ex-convicts are often 
still human enough to be averse from starvation, 
and even from easier forms of self-destruction; 
and they yield to the temptation to steal. Like 
the idiots they are, they may hope to make a big 
strike and get away with it, and in some remote 
or foreign place, under another name, live out an 
unobserved and blameless existence. 

Thereupon there is rejoicing in the ranks of the 
secret service; armed with their bertillons, they 
swoop upon their quarry and bear him away. 
" May it please the Court, this man is an incor- 
rigible; not deterred by previous punishment, im- 
mediately upon release he plunges again into 
crime ; he should receive the limit 1 " The Court 



84 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

thinks so too; the limit is imposed, and the male- 
factor is led out to the living death which will end 
with death in reality. And now will some right- 
eous and competent person arise and proclaim that 
this man's yielding to his first temptation to crime 
did NOT involve greater moral turpitude than 
did his yielding to the second temptation or to the 
third greater or at least as great and that 
therefore the severer sentence is justified? His 
first misdeed was prompted by hunger, ignorance, 
drunkenness, or cupidity ; the others were the fruit 
of desperation itself and how many of you have 
known what desperation means ? 

You perceive that this story proceeds by di- 
gressions; such value as it may have it will owe 
mainly to such digressions, so I will not apologize 
for them. My friend and I, our ordeal completed, 
were returned to our cells to think it over. The 
walls and ceiling of the cells are painted a light 
gray color; it is against the rules, except by special 
indulgence, to affix pictures or other objects to 
them. The " coddling of criminals," so widely 
advertised, does not include permission to give a 
homelike look to their perennial quarters; it is 
more conducive to moral reform that they should 
contemplate painted steel. There was one camp- 
stool in our cell; later, cells were supplied with 
two wooden chairs, the seats sloping at such an 
angle with the backs as rendered sitting a penance ; 
cushions were not provided. I remember seeing 



Routine 85 

similar contrivances in old English cathedrals, 
relics of a day when monks had to be kept from 
falling asleep during the religious rites. We 
might also sit upon the lower bunk, bent forward 
in such an attitude as would avert bumping our 
heads against the upper one. Each convict, early 
in his sojourn, has a religious interview with the 
Chaplain, who presents him with a copy of the 
New Testament not also of the Old; you may 
remember that the latter records certain regretta- 
ble incidents of a sinister and immoral sort, cal- 
culated, I presume, to shock the tender budding 
impulses toward regeneration of prison readers. 
One may get other books of a secular kind from 
the library, upon written application; and prison- 
ers of the first grade may subscribe for newspapers 
that contain no objectionable matter. But only 
a small proportion of the inmates is addicted to 
reading, and the opportunities for doing so are 
limited. And as months and years go by, the 
desolation and sterility of the place weigh heavier 
upon the spirit, the mind reduces its radius and 
grows inert, and stimulants stronger than current 
fiction are needed to rouse it. Prison, prison, 
prison; steel walls and gratings; the predestinate 
screechings and clangings of whistles and gongs; 
the endless filings to and fro, in and out; the 
stealthy insolence of guards, or their treacherous 
good-fellowship ; the abstracted or menacing gaze 
of the higher officials; the dreariness, aimlessness, 



86 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

and sometimes the severity of the daily labor; the 
sullen threat of the loaded rifles; the hollow, 
echoing spaces that shut out hope; the thought of 
the stifling stench of the dungeons beneath the 
pavements, hidden from all save the victims, 
whose very existence is officially denied; the clos- 
ing of all personal communication with the outer 
world, except such as commends itself to the 
whims of the official censors; this morgue of hu- 
man beings still alive the impenetrable stu- 
pidity, futility and outrage of it all slowly or 
not so slowly unbalance the mind and corrupt the 
nature. Meanwhile, newspapers clamor against 
the coddling of criminals, and the too indulgent 
officials smile sadly and protest that they have not 
the heart to be stern. " Coddling criminals " 
the alliteration makes it roll pleasantly off the 
tongue ! 

But do I forget the many indulgences given to 
prisoners and so profusely celebrated in every 
mention publicly made of Atlanta Penitentiary? 
Let me name them once more. Saturday being 
a non-working day, it used to be the custom to lock 
the prisoners in their cells from Saturday morning 
till Monday morning a custom still followed 
at many penitentiaries; for how could they be con- 
trolled if not split up into working gangs, and thus 
prevented from conspiring to mutiny? It is one 
of the obsessions of prison authorities that the 
prisoners are severally and collectively a sort of 



Routine 87 

wild beast, always straining at the leash, and ready 
at the least opportunity to break forth in wild and 
deadly disorder. It is obviously expedient, too, to 
impress the public with this conviction, and there- 
fore, in part, we have the clubs, rifles, and general 
parade of watchfulness. As a matter of fact, 
meanwhile, nothing is more easy to handle than a 
prisonful of convicts, if the most elementary tact 
be used; and they are eagerly grateful for the 
smallest unforced and spontaneous act of kindness. 

Until about eighteen months ago, however, se- 
vere restrictions were in vogue, and the warden 
declared that it was his belief and policy that men 
in prison should be taught by precept and illustra- 
tion to regard themselves as dead to the world; 
that they should be held practically incommuni- 
cado, no visitors, letters at most but once a month, 
no conversation between prisoners silence, soli- 
tude, suffocation in this terrible quicksand of jail 
for months, years, or a lifetime, at the mercy of 
men to whom mercy is a jest. Such a regimen is 
still in force at many jails, and when combined 
with contract labor, nothing in the age-long his- 
tory of penal imprisonment shows a blacker 
record. It is advocated as the best way to induce 
men to reform, and become, after release, useful 
and industrious members of the community. 

A couple of years or so ago, Atlanta was visited 
by an Attorney-General, who was not prepared 
for what he saw, nor had the things he should not 



88 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

have seen been removed from sight before he saw 
them. He demanded some improvements on the 
spot, and soon after a new deputy warden was 
appointed a young man, of kindly disposition, 
though weak, not inured as yet to the conventional 
brutalities, and with a backing in Washington 
which gave him unusual powers. Among good 
things which he instituted and insisted on were 
two and a half hours outdoors on Saturday after- 
noons, for baseball and general relaxation; con- 
versation at meals; music at dinner by a band 
made up from convicts; regular bi-weekly letters, 
with extra letters allowed between times by special 
request to orderly convicts; concerts or vaudeville 
performances every month or so in the chapel, by 
professionals. 

Insanity became less frequent after this, and the 
general health of the men improved. They had 
something to look forward to, and to look back to, 
and the freedom of the baseball concession led to 
no disorders; something like hope and cheerful- 
ness began to appear, like green blades of grass 
in spring. The warden cleverly seized the op- 
portunity to take credit to himself for all the im- 
provements, and to circulate industriously in the 
local papers the praise of the model penitentiary. 
But neither did he fail to take advantage of the 
new situation to tighten his grasp upon the reins 
of control. The majority of jails, in addition to 
the ordinary spy system operated by officials, 



Routine 89 

organize a supplementary one composed of con- 
victs themselves stool pigeons certain care- 
fully selected prisoners, who are rewarded for 
treachery to their fellows by various indulgences 
and secret liberties. The principle is detestable, 
and has evil effects. The stool pigeons them- 
selves are of course the basest members of the 
community, and the other prisoners, soon learning 
to suspect them, come at last to a miserable dis- 
trust or one another for the comrade appar- 
ently most sincere may be at heart only a more 
artful traitor. In this, they play into the officials' 
hands, whose theory of government is fear, and 
who find aid to themselves in the mutual misgiv- 
ings and hatreds of their charges. 

Evidently, the relaxations of the baseball after- 
noons afforded a capital opportunity to the stool 
pigeons, and the results were soon apparent. The 
spies, in order to curry favor with their employers, 
reported not actual infringements of discipline 
only, but guessed at what might be, and even in- 
vented what was not, often by way of retaliation 
against personal enemies. I shall return to this 
subject hereafter; enough, for the present, that it 
counterbalanced in a degree the physical benefits 
of the new concessions by engendering mental dis- 
quiets and animosities among the entire popula- 
tion, and especially inflaming them against the offi- 
cials. I am not myself sure, for example, whether 
or not one or another of my most intimate ac- 



90 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

quaintances among the prisoners may not all the 
while have been on the watch to betray me behind 
my back. For aught I know, it may have been to 
some such sordid treachery that I owe the-refusal 
of my parole, when it became due. And any re- 
spect for constituted prison authorities, upheld by 
such means, was impossible. 

When the coddling of prisoners involves feed- 
ing them on poison, they would prefer Spartan se- 
verity and fair warning. 



VI 
SOME PRISON FRIENDS OF MINE 

VAGUE noises are at all times audible in 
jail stirrings, foot-falls, a subdued voice 
now and then, the sharp orders of an official 
" bawlings out" as they are termed; the clanging 
of steel gates, the murmur of machinery, the 
cacophany of musical instruments during practise 
hours in the chapel; as well as the periodical 
screeches and ringings of whistles and gongs. 
The general impression on ear and eye alike is 
of stealthy repression, a checked unrest a multi- 
farious creature, uneasy but kept down. The 
place is perhaps hardly less silent than a cloister; 
but the peace of the cloister is utterly absent. An 
atmosphere of animosity and contention pervades 
all a constant apprehension of sinister things 
liable to happen, a breathless struggle, the sullen- 
ness of hate, the whispering of treachery. The 
eyes of officials peer, watch and threaten; those 
of the convicts are downcast but privily rebellious, 
or deprecatingly servile. 

It is the everlasting pregnancy of war between 
slave and master, quite different from submission 
to rightful authority. Whatever the law may say, 

91 



92 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

the rightfulness of prison authority is never ad 
mitted by prisoners. Honest authority is tranquil 
and secure; prison authority goes armed, conscious 
of its unrighteousness, and there is unremitting 
nervous stress on both sides. Both sides seem se- 
cretly to await a signal to sudden conflict. 

At dinner, soon after my arrival, amid the om- 
nipresent murmurous palaver of conversation, 
there fell an unusual noise. The unusual is al- 
ways formidable in jail. The noise was nothing 
in itself, and would have passed unheeded in a 
hotel dining-room. But over us, crowded to- 
gether there, spread an instant hush. All knew 
that men had been stabbed, frenzied affrays had 
broken out in that room. What was it now? 
The guard in the window stiffened ancLpoised his 
rifle. The guards on the floor caught their breath, 
but assumed a confident air. The men sat star- 
ing in the direction of the noise, tense and wait- 
ing. 

Nothing happened; somebody had dropped a 
plate and broken it, perhaps. But had some nat- 
ural leader of the enslaved leaped up and shouted 
at that juncture, murder would have followed the 
next moment. Among every hundred convicts 
there are eight or ten whom misery and wrong 
have made reckless, whose morbid rebelliousness 
needs, to break forth, only the shadow of oppor- 
tunity to kill before being killed, and they accept 
it. But it was not to be that day, and we relaxed, 



Some Prison Friends of Mine 93 

and grinned, nervously or grimly, and resumed our 
meal. 

Eight hundred men, clad in a shapeless monot- 
ony of dingy blue, labeled on the back with their 
disgrace, stepping lightly or shuffling hastily to 
and fro, heads bent and eyes downcast, perform- 
ing various offices, menial, clerical or industrial, 
with a certain obsequiousness and ostensible zeal 
that was yet inwardly repulsion and protest 
these were men born under the great flag, Amer- 
icans, my countrymen, and now my companions ! 
What a change, what a degradation from the free 
American citizen of the streets and boundless ex- 
panses! Not men, now, but slaves, condemned 
to penal servitude; not' citizens, but a class apart 
and alien; felons, criminals, no longer entitled to 
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but ex- 
isting in shame and on suffrance, ruined, nameless, 
parted from friends and families, with present 
physical pain and mental misery, and with a future 
of hounding and helplessness, of fear and hiding, 
of uselessness and aimlessness, of insanity and base 
death ! 

Upon what plea are these conditions estab- 
lished ? Because the slaves had broken the law 
been guilty of crimes. But what crimes? Some 
had done murder, others committed rape, some 
had held up a train, another had blown a safe, an- 
other was a pickpocket, another a white-slaver, 
this one had stolen food to avert starvation, that 



94 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

was a confidei :e man or bank embezzler, here 
was one snared L 1 some technicality of new finance 
laws, yonder an ^norant moonshiner from the 
hills, who had grc 7 n corn in his back yard and 
thought he had a rij. it to make whiskey out of it 
he had no other means of livelihood. Break- 
ers of God's laws; of man's; victims of tricks and 
legal technicalities, of torturing want and of head- 
long passion, and of sheer court errors or of per- 
jured testimony here they were, all on the same 
footing, no discriminations made! To what end? 
So that they might be punished and repent and 
go forth better men and useful workers, and so 
that society might be protected and its integrity 
vindicated. That is the ostensible reason; no 
other is alleged. 

It sounds like a jest; but the men are here, the 
thing is done. In some moods I would say to 
myself, " It's too preposterous it can't be 
it's an hallucination a bad dream ! " But there 
it was, visible and palpable. Was it protection 
for society to shut up a man from ability to sup- 
port those dependent on him, who were thus them- 
selves driven to want and perhaps crime, multiply- 
ing the original criminality by three or four or 
half a dozen? Could any injury which the culprit 
could do to the community equal the injury thus 
done by the community to him and his, and indi- 
rectly to itself, by such treatment? Or could the 
technical and perhaps unconscious violator of an 



Some Prison Friends of Mine 95 

obscure and whimsical law be reformed by putting 
him on an equality with a cold-blooded murderer, 
or with a man who had grown rich by selling the 
shame of women? Was the punishment equable 
which handled with equal severity a brutish negro 
from the cotton fields, and a man brought up in 
refinement and gentleness? 

But I would go further, and challenge the right 
of the community to inflict penal imprisonment as 
we know it at all. Some criminals belong in hos- 
pitals, others in insane asylums, for others the 
thoughtless neglect and selfishness of society is re- 
sponsible, and they should be succored, not pun- 
ished; and the remainder should be constrained, 
under surveillance but not in confinement, to com- 
pensate for the harm they did by labor or self- 
denial aimed directly at that result. But of this 
hereafter. 

Meanwhile, I paid attention to my companions 
themselves. 

In their intercourse with one another there was a 
singular amenity or pleasantness, and with some 
who had been prisoners for a long time, a sort of 
childlikeness. But it was like the childlikeness of 
a person partly dazed, or recovering from a severe 
illness or shock. They greeted one another with 
a covert smile, an unobtrusive movement of head 
or hand; only when under direct observation of an 
official would they pass without a sign. The usual 
words were, " How're you feeling? " or, " How're 



96 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

they comin' ? " not in the perfunctory tone of greet- 
ings in the outer world, but with an accent of real 
interest and solicitude. The answer would be, 
" Good! " " Fine! " with as much heartiness as 
could be thrown into it though it might be ob- 
vious enough that the truth was far from being 
that. 

There was one dear old fellow who had a 
variation on these forms ; he was an alleged moon- 
shiner, though, as he said, " Yes, I did make some 
whiskey, but I never sold none ! " " How're you 
feeling, Joe?" I would say; and he would reply, 
with his pathetic smile, and his high, soft voice, 
"Pretty well pretty well, for 'n old man!" 
with a drawling emphasis on the " old." He was 
about seventy, with the soft brown hair of youth, 
but bent and stiff and wrinkled with hard years 
and rheumatics; and if I questioned him more 
closely, he would confess that he suffered from 
" lots o' misery here ! " passing his gnarled old 
hands over his digestive tract. Indeed, four-fifths 
of the men had that trouble in more or less acute 
form, owing to the atrocious food supplied as our 
regular diet. 

Joe's face, though lined with the hardships and 
privations of a long life, was beautifully formed, 
aristocratic in its delicate contours; and he pos- 
sessed, and constantly used, one of the most delec- 
table, contagious and genuine laughs that ever 
made music in my ears. The men would ransack 



Some Prison Friends of Mine 97 

their humorous resources in conversation with 
Joe, merely for the sake of making him laugh. 
He would fix his old eyes squarely on yours, and 
laugh and laugh with infinite mirth and good na- 
ture. Such a sound in such a place was rare and 
wonderful, and helped one like fresh water in a 
desert. 

The general friendliness among the men so 
contrasted with their demeanor toward the officials 
was due to the identity of their common inter- 
ests; they were in the same boat, facing the same 
perils and disasters, united in the same aims and 
hopes, and leagued against the same oppressors. 
They lived in the constant dread of some calamity; 
and if I met the same man three or four times in 
the same day, he would never fail to make the same 
enquiry " How're you feeling?" recognizing 
that I might have received some ugly blow in the 
interval. There was a spontaneous courtesy and 
a charitableness in it that touched the heart. 

The same sentiment was manifested at meals; if 
anybody got hold of anything that seemed to him 
a little better than usual, he could not rest till he 
had offered some of it, or all of it, to his neighbors 
at table. " Here, take this take it I got 
more'n I want! " Or, watching his opportunity, 
Ned the runner, who had comforted us on our first 
night in prison, would come to the door of my cell, 
with his Irish humor and cordiality shining in his 
eyes. " Say, Mr. Hawthorne, there's a dividend 



98 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

been declared! " and out of some surreptitious re- 
ceptacle he would produce three or four crumpled 
cigarette papers of all contraband articles in the 
prison the most prized. " No take 'em I 
got no end of 'em! " 

A peculiar consideration was manifested by the 
men toward " the old man "; my hair was white 
enough, to be sure, but it had been so for nearly 
twenty years, and I was in much better physical 
condition than most of them. I accepted their 
kind offices with gratitude and emotion, and, when 
I saw that to do otherwise would hurt their feel- 
ings, their concrete gifts, too. 

But there were many instances of self-sacrifice 
greater than these; men would go to the hole 
sooner than betray a comrade; and you are fortu- 
nate in being unable to comprehend what that 
means. If a comrade in his range was sick and 
unable to come to meals, I have constantly seen 
a man secrete half of his miserable breakfast or 
dinner in his pocket, to be carried up to the invalid 
and smuggled into his cell. It was a matter of 
course, nobody remarked it. Any mistake or in- 
discretion committed by a prisoner would be in- 
stantly and almost mechanically covered by the 
man nearest him, though at the risk of punishment 
and the punishment for betraying human sym- 
pathy in this way is of course it is ! espe- 
cially severe ; it is conspiracy to cheat the Govern- 
ment. 



Some Prison Friends of Mine 99 

The traditional tale of a prisoner's devotion to 
animals is also true ; a man next me at table a 
Y e gg fr two weeks poured half his allowance 
of milk (he was on milk diet for acute indigestion) 
into a surreptitious bottle, and bore it off for the 
sustenance of a couple of little forlorn kittens that 
he was acting as special providence for. The 
meditative smile with which he perpetrated this 
theft upon the prison authorities was a wonderful 
sight. Another convict, a hardened old timer, for 
several weeks lavished cargoes of tenderness upon 
a rat which he had laboriously conciliated and 
tamed. " What makes you so fond of that ani- 
mal? " enquired one day a sentimental and statis- 
tical old lady visitor to the prison. After strug- 
gling with his emotions for a minute, he burst out, 
" Yah ! he bit the guard ! " This dialogue was 
overheard, and enchanted the whole penitentiary 
for months. 

But one reflects that, whatever humane or lov- 
able traits prisoners may exhibit, they are after all 
criminals! The existence in a lost soul of good 
qualities or impulses side by side with evil ones has 
long been recognized. Victor Hugo illustrated the 
discovery in his Jean Valjean, it was a staple with 
Dickens, Bret Harte's heroes are all of that type, 
it was the inspiration of much of Charles Reade's 
eloquence, Kipling has more than a touch of it, our 
contemporary fiction-mongers sentimentalize over 
it, and the train-robber in the movies usually has a 



1OO The Subterranean Brotherhood 

full line of sterling virtues up his sleeve. The 
lost soul, in short, brims over, upon occasion, with 
the wine of regeneration. Therefore (so runs the 
moral) let us of the elect furbish up our charity, 
and be as tolerant toward this non-human class of 
people as may be consistent with our own safety 
and respectability. Scraps of our own lustrous im- 
peccability have somehow found their way into 
them, and we cannot afford wholly to disavow 
them, in spite of their wretched lodgings. 

This phariseeism is so inveterate with us, that I 
may fairly say that one has to be sentenced to 
jail as a criminal in order to correct it. From 
that vantage ground or Mount of Vision it pres- 
ently dawns upon us that these men are no more 
lost souls than we are are, in fact, woven out 
of the same yarn and cut from the same cloth. 
And from this same vantage groun'd it also grad- 
ually dawns upon us that, in one respect at least, 
the aggregate in a jail is better than the same 
number of men taken haphazard from the city 
streets. For the former have now laid aside self- 
righteousness and dissimulation, which are of the 
essence of our unrestrained civil life : " I killed a 
man, yes; I robbed a bank, I picked a pocket, I 
lived off a woman, I swindled my stockholders, I 
counterfeited a banknote." No disguise here 
no evasion. 

But when you go into the details of the transac- 
tion, weigh the causes which led up to it, consider 



Some Prison Friends of Mine 10 1 

the conditions surrounding it, realize the tempta- 
tions or provocations that precipitated it, you step 
into your confessional : " Lord, my nature and 
heart are not different from this sinner's, and but 
for accidents and good fortune which were none 
of my providing, I should stand accountant to-day 
as he does ! " You bring the whited sepulcher 
home to you, and find that you have been living 
in it yourself. And if you have a little intelligence 
you will acknowledge in your convict the scapegoat 
who not more and perhaps less blameworthy 
than you is bearing your iniquities as well as his 
own. 

So, instead of condescending, with supercilious 
eyebrows and spotless broadcloth, to concede that 
these unfortunate members of a non-human class 
sometimes betray traces of saving grace after all, 
it might better become you to wish that some of 
their saving graces appertained to yourself. At 
your best showing, you are a pharisee and a hypo- 
crite, and he is not; he stands confessed; your sin is 
still secret in your soul. By -what right do you 
look down upon him ? 

These things which I now say to you, I said first 
to myself, sitting in my cell, or watching the end- 
less gray-blue files shuffle past me on their way to 
and from meals. It was of small help or signifi- 
cance that I claimed innocence of the particular 
offense that happened to be charged against me; 
I was as indistinguishable from these men in heart 



1O2 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

as I was in outward garb and rating. And I had 
manhood enough to feel glad that, since they had 
to be here, I was here with them. The burden of 
the scapegoat has its compensations. 

On my first Sunday in the chapel, there came an 
exhorter or revivalist, accustomed to dealing with 
prisoners from the platform, and dubbed " The 
Old War-horse of Salvation," or some such title. 
He had his white waistcoat, his raucous, shouting 
voice, his phrases, his anecdotes, his " my men," 
" my friends," " fellows " ; his " I'm saved, I hope, 
and you can be! " Oh, the phariseeism of that 
" I hope I " At the end of his uproar, he called 
upon those of his hearers (we had all sat quite 
silent and impassive during the performance) who 
were willing to be saved, to stand up in their places. 
All the stool pigeons arose (poor devils), and a 
few other bewildered persons who fancied it ex- 
pedient to be on the side of the angels, " Thank 
you thank you thank you I " hoarsely cried 
the exhorter, naively accepting their response as a 
personal compliment to himself. 

But that great audience sat dark, silent and im- 
passive, and it could only have been the tough hide 
of the Old War-horse that made him immune to 
their cold contempt. I said to myself, u What a 
terrible audience it is I Who is fit to stand before 
it? " These men had seen, known and suffered the 
terrible, nameless things; the Unknown God, per- 
haps, had spoken to many of them in their solitude ; 



Some Prison Friends of Mine 103 

and now this being of white waistcoat and phrases 
must get up and urge them to wash their sins in 
the blood of the Lamb ! In their silence they were 
preaching to him a sermon such as no mortal pul- 
piteer ever uttered; but his ears were deaf to it. 
" One three six nine souls saved to-night ! 
Thank you thank you thank you ! " And 
he turns to receive the polite congratulations of the 
distinguished guests who sat behind him on the 
stage. 

In prison, and only in prison, the veil is lifted or 
rent in twain, and men are revealed as they are. 
As they stand before their Creator, they stand 
now before their fellows. They are helpless 
so warden and guards think but they have 
gained a power beyond any physical might of man. 
They are voiceless, but they challenge mankind. 
They endure every indignity and outrage; but an 
account will be required of those responsible for 
it. 

I wish to emphasize this dropping of the mask 
this stop put to posturing and pretending 
this going forth in rude nakedness before one's 
fellows. The man in the church pew chants out 
with the rest of the congregation, " We are sinners, 
desperately wicked, and there is no health in us; " 
but he says it with his tongue in his cheek, and 
fitting his mask on only the more tightly. Or the 
man " convinced of sin " on the anxious seat at 
the revivalist meeting frenziedly accuses himself of 



1O4 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

all the sins in the decalogue, but finds protection in 
the very generality and promiscuity of his confes- 
sion, which includes and at the same time conceals 
the particular fact that he robbed the till and got 
away with it. We seldom hear of a penitent of 
this kind being indicted by a Grand Jury, tried, 
convicted and jailed on the basis of his salvation 
outcries. He talks figuratively. 

There is nothing dramatic or hysterical in the at- 
titude of the felon in his cell. He robbed the till, 
he admits to you ; but he does not drag in the rest 
of the decalogue to divert your attention. And 
his penitence, when he feels any, is not, in nine cases 
out of ten, prompted by the expectation of getting 
a clean bill of health on his entire life-account (the 
empty till ..included) from a good natured Savior 
not too keen about details. He tells you, as a 
rule, " I was foolish and took too many chances ! " 
or, " If I'd handled the thing by myself, instead of 
admitting a partner, it would have been all right; " 
or, " Oh, of course, I was a damned fool; what's 
the use of bucking up against the fly cops ! " In 
the case of a murder, it might be, " I'm sorry I 
killed him, but I guess any fellow would have done 
the same in my case." 

Duration of confinement does not modify this 
attitude ; the man of ten years says the same as the 
man of ten months, except and the exception is 
worth noting that the former's moral sense, 
whatever he originally had of it, has been blunted 



Some Prison Friends of Mine 105 

or discouraged, and he has conceived a settled ani- 
mosity against human authority, and disbelief in 
the justice and sincerity of its administrators. He 
has been the subject, during his incarceration, of 
such numberless acts of gratuitous tyranny, outrage 
and cruelty, and has seen so much of " the way 
things go," in general, that though he may concede 
that honesty is the best policy, he can find no oth&r 
recommendation for it, and is prone to the secret 
conviction that honesty itself is somehow only a 
cleverer way of cheating. 

Such a state of mind is bred by prison experi- 
ence " not otherwise. Prison obstructs or alto- 
gether closes every door to genuine moral reform 
in prisoners. 

A few larger souls overcome the obstructions; 
for example, our John Ross, who more than thirty- 
three years ago, in the blindness of a drunken spree 
in Yokahoma, killed a shipmate who angered him. 
He died in jail last June (1913). He was sen- 
tenced to death, but got commutation to life im- 
prisonment. He was a fine type of man, physic-ally 
and mentally. His spirit was never broken by 
what he endured, and some years before being 
transferred to Atlanta, he became, in a simple, 
non-sensational, but profound way, religious. At 
Atlanta, in his cell, he was a center of good influ- 
ence on his fellow convicts; truthful, hearty, faith- 
ful, manly, cheerful; his preaching was by personal 
example, and by support and help given at need to 



io6 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

the weak and despairing. He was promised free- 
dom on parole; the promise was not kept; but even 
this last betrayal failed to break his staunch heart. 
He died like a man, with composure and-dignity. 

With a few such exceptions, prisoners are un- 
repentant except for business reasons that is, 
either because they recognize that crime does not 
pay, or in order to influence in their favor the 
pardoning power. Many of them, of course, em- 
ploy their prison opportunities to devise new 
crimes and to train fresh recruits from the younger 
convicts. Men who have been imprisoned more 
than once lose hope of anything better than tran- 
sient freedom; they know they will be prevented 
by the police from earning an honest livelihood, 
and that they must either starve or steal. They 
become in the end mere prison creatures, destitute 
of evil or of good, active or passive. 

J repeat that the experience of associating with 
men without disguises is novel and refreshing. A 
tedious burden is lifted from the shoulders; the 
bones in the sepulcher are less revolting than the 
whitewash outside; it is pleasanter to know what 
a man is than to suspect him. It is certainly much 
wholesomer, on the other hand, to uncover your 
own deformity than to hide it, especially when you 
know, or fear, that the hiding is unsuccessful. 

There is a sense of brotherhood, long since un- 
familiar to human intercourse under usual condi- 
tions, but welcome even at the cost of conditions 



Some Prison Friends of Mine 107 

such as these. The truth gradually emerges to our 
consciousness it is not the evil in us that kills 
brotherhood, but the vain, unending effort to make 
the evil seem good. Now our eyes meet one an- 
other's frankly; the skilfullest counterfeit was 
worse than the worst reality. There is nothing in 
us to be proud of, but something to be thankful 
for. Society has done its worst to us ; but it could 
not take away from us our mutual kindliness, or the 
qualities that justify it. We are condemned as 
wicked, but we are comforted by one another's 
good. 

Prison, in short, more convincingly than any ab- 
stract argument, demonstrates its own futility as a 
means of either taking revenge upon the prisoner, 
or of inducing him to hate crime and to turn to 
good. Revenge, of course, is officially discredited 
nowadays, though it is practised as actively as ever 
under guises more or less civilized; but the pre- 
tense of moral reform- by penal imprisonment is be- 
coming too preposterous to be tolerated much 
longer. On the contrary, prison renders the great 
aggregate of prisoners collectively self-conscious; 
the goats find themselves, and are forced into an- 
tagonism with the sheep not only as individuals but 
as a body. They make common cause together, 
and in obscure ways achieve a degree of organiza- 
tion. They learn to regard the community not as 
better than themselves, but as more successful pen- 
sioners of fortune ; they fear them because the ad- 



1O8 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

vantage of numbers is on their side, but they hate 
them because they feel, either justly or unjustly, 
that they have suffered injustice at their hands, and 
they will prey upon them when opportunity serves 
not only from the original motive of physical need, 
but from the additional and more sinister one, bred 
in prison, of retaliation for the wrong done them. 

When you sap a man's faith in plain justice, and 
terrify him with the threat of irresistible power, 
and torture him in mind and body through the 
exercise of that power, you drive him to the sup- 
port and society of men similarly circumstanced, 
and thus create the precise analogue in the body 
politic of a cancer in the individual body. Prison 
attempts to segregate this cancer, but only pro- 
motes its increase. Its poison is in the blood and 
circulates everywhere. 

As I passed out of the dining-room after meals 
each day, I came to notice a young man who sat 
at a table near the door. He sat with folded arms, 
and with a set and gloomy countenance; his eyes 
were fixed on vacancy, and he did not speak with 
his companions. A crutch leaned against his shoul- 
der; he had lost one leg. 

I learned his story. In the settlement of a small 
estate of which he was an heir, a sister of his had 
obtained money that belonged to him, and when 
asked to restore it to him, had refused to do so. 
After some fruitless negotiation, he got angry, and 
gent her through the mails a message containing 



Some Prison Friends of Mine 109 

violent expressions of reproach and animosity. 
The young woman took this paper to a United 
States marshal, who brought it to the attention of 
the district attorney, with the result that the 
brother was indicted under some law of libel or of 
obscene matter, was arrested, tried, and convicted, 
and sentenced to Atlanta penitentiary for five years. 
After he had been lodged in his cell, his sister re- 
pented of her action, and sought to have him freed ; 
but the law does not recognize such changes of 
heart, and the brother must serve out his time. 

We all know how easily family quarrels arise, 
how bitter they may be while they last, and how 
readily, withal, they may be accommodated by tact- 
ful handling. The sister had done wrong; the 
brother had lost his temper; in what family has 
not such an outbreak occurred? But because the 
brother had happened to put his bad temper on 
paper, the law, being rashly invoked, seizes him, 
takes five years out of his life, and brands him with 
the shame of the jail bird. Upon what plea can 
such an act be construed as justice? But the dis- 
trict attorney shows the court that the statute has 
been violated; the judge charges the jury, the jury 
finds its verdict in accordance with the legal evi- 
dence, and the thing is done. It is a mechanical 
process nothing human about it. 

Review your own life, and discover whether you 
have ever stood in the shadow of a similar catas- 
trophe. Were you ever angry with a relative or 



11O The Subterranean Brotherhood 

with any other person, and did you express your 
anger to him in words? Then you are as guilty 
as this one-legged boy, sitting there at his table with 
his life ruined. Only, he happened to wlrite his 
anger, and the sister happened to show it to a 
lawyer, and the machine was set in motion which 
no repentance or forgiveness or remorse can stop. 
But the machine does not increase the culprit's 
fault, and for such a fault the legal penalty may be 
five years in jail. You are not so remote from the 
subterranean brotherhood as you may have sup- 
posed. 

Will prison reform him? Is society protected? 
Is faith in human justice promoted by such things ? 
His case is but one of scores in every jail that are 
as bad and worse. But " throw him to the lions 
serves him right! " is still the cry. 



VII 
THE MEN ABOVE 

THE men below would like to feel respect for 
the men above, even if it be a respect mar- 
ried to fear. It is more humiliating to be domi- 
nated by worthless creatures, of no character or 
genuine manhood, whose authority is effective only 
because it happens to be the tool through which 
works the irresistible power of a government, than 
to obey men of native energy and force, captains 
as well of their own souls as of the bodies of their 
subjects. The despotism of a cur is revolting, 
and rouses the wild beast in the victims. Those 
responsible for its infliction insult human nature. 
As far as I have had opportunity to observe, or 
have been informed, the despotism of the cur in 
our jails, and in those of other countries perhaps 
(though not to nearly the same extent as in ours) 
is the rule; and that of self-respecting and re- 
spected men is the rare exception. Hate inflamed 
with contempt is a dangerous and evil passion to 
stimulate. It awakens a thirst for savage retalia- 
tion which hate alone does not produce. More- 
over, weak and cowardly tyrants are always more 
cruel than courageous and masculine ones, and 

in 



112 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

they do not observe any consistent line of con- 
duct; in the intervals of their debauches of bru- 
tality they are oily and ingratiating, make fa- 
vorites, offer pusillanimous apologies, protest hu- 
mane intentions, and allege absurd excuses for 
past outrages. A brute is bad enough, and we 
are all brutes at bottom; but a brute who covers 
his hyena snarl with the smug mask of a saint 
is monstrous and detestable. 

The wardens of many of our jails are double 
men. Behind the imposing fagade of their physi- 
cal aspect we detect an uneasy, hurried, shrewdly 
contriving little creature, quite incommensurate 
with the material bodily structure built up for his 
concealment and protection. He will not come out 
in the open, but seeks some advantage, plans to 
get behind us and execute some cunning coup-de- 
theater, while our suspicions are lulled by the hos- 
pitable and comfortable glow of the exterior. In 
his dealings with the convicts as a body, he is 
apt to imitate Macbeth's witches, and keep the 
word of promise to the ear, but break it to the 
hope; he has vanity without self confidence, lacks 
the truthfulness of the strong, his voice does not 
resound and compel, he dances and fidgets, grins 
and is grave in the same instant. If the men's 
attitude be sullen, he tries to be bluff and hearty, 
" my-boys " them, claps them heartily on the 
shoulder, or lapses into whining and gushing. It 
is all of worse than no avail with these unde- 



\ 
The Men Above 113 

ceivable readers of character. It is a curious 
effect of the working of esprit de corps in jails 
that the prisoners may feel ashamed of such 
unmanly antics in their warden, especially should 
strangers be within eyeshot. 

Of course, in his encounters with prisoners 
singly, a man of this type may show more of his 
real nature, especially if the prisoner be one of 
the inoffensive sort. He will be bland, insolent, 
indifferent or cruel, as suits his mood of the mo- 
ment. " Fod God's sake, won't you let me write 
her just one letter? " implored a prisoner who had 
just got news of the fatal illness of his wife. Pic- 
ture the situation two human beings face to 
face, one helpless and in agony, the other with ab- 
solute power! The official faced the man de- 
liberately, with an amused smile. " I can," he 
said, slowly, " but I won't I " How would you 
have felt in such a case? Could you ever forget 
it? and would you not be ready, for that official's 
sake, to hate mankind, and to curse God and die ? 
But you perhaps believe that convicts have no hu- 
man feelings, and that they are cheerful under such 
treatment. 

The value of these remarks lies, of course, in 
their general character; the conduct of an indi- 
vidual, regarded by itself, would have small im- 
portance. And if I do not instance the conduct 
of those honest and manly officials who are to 
be found here and there, it is because the public 



114 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

is already informed concerning them; their deeds 
do not seek darkness, but are visible by their own 
light. It is the rascals that we do not hear about, 
or if we do, it is through reports of press~ agents 
in newspapers and otherwise, who are mere 
mouthpieces for the lying self-praise of the rascals 
themselves. 

While I was in jail, I had access, by a fortunate 
circumstance, to the annual reports to the De- 
partment of several wardens of prisons in various 
states, and was able to compare their stories of 
themselves with the accounts given me by prison- 
ers who had lived under them and with my own 
first hand knowledge of prison conditions, which, 
with a few shining exceptions, are so terribly and 
remorselessly alike the civilized world over. 
After making every allowance for the different 
point of view of master and slave, it was very 
plain that the author of the report was not merely 
prevaricating, or coloring his facts to render them 
acceptable to his superiors, but was lying outright 
often, both directly and by omissions. He would 
pose as a broad-minded and compassionate father 
to his inmates, when all the time he was subject- 
ing them to cruel and needless severities and tor- 
tures. There was one man, who has lately 
resigned, I believe, full of years and honors, whose 
addresses at the meetings of federal wardens were 
almost angelic in tone and tenor, who was in fact 
notorious among persons who had actual knowl- 



The Men Above 115 

edge of his official conduct as one of the most re- 
morseless tyrants toward the men in contemporary 
prison annals. Many men of bad conduct may 
be excused on the plea that they are ignorant 
know no better; but this man was an intelligent 
student of penology, and knew exactly how wicked 
and wanton he was. He was an innocent baby 
once upon a time, and might have grown up to be 
no worse a man than is the estimable person who 
now reads these lines; but he took up prison work, 
and the atmosphere of crime, and preoccupation 
with it, and the license to use arbitrary powers, 
made a devil of him. It is a common story. 
Another series of reports showed a man who, 
beginning as a reactionary of an extreme type, ad- 
vocating the most ruthless measures toward con- 
victs, finally felt the pressure of the wave of prison 
reform which is gathering force just now, and ad- 
justed his reports and addresses so as to make 
himself appear as a leading apostle of the new 
ideas. But though his public professions changed, 
the chief difference in his practises was that, from 
having been undisguised, they became secret, and 
so far as circumstances permitted, he acted, and 
permitted or encouraged his subordinates to act 
as cruelly as before. However, a new deputy 
warden was presently appointed, with more liberal 
ideas, and endowed with large powers, and for a 
while the condition of the prisoners improved; 
the warden, with his ear to the ground, and his 



ii6 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

eye on the handwriting on the wall, deftly adjust- 
ing himself to the situation, and industriously 
claiming for himself credit for all betterments in- 
troduced by the deputy who, having no press 
agent, was forced to stand inactively by and see his 
honest credit filched away from him in public 
opinion, at least. Of course, the prisoners knew 
perfectly well on which leg the boot was. But 
prisoners cannot make themselves heard outside 
the jail. 

Accordingly, this warden, whose methods I 
know well, is now quoted as a signal champion of 
the new and more merciful dispensation, though 
only two or three years ago, according to his own 
personally written and signed reports, he was for 
keeping prisoners practically incommunicado 
dead to the world; writing and receiving letters 
to be nearly or wholly done away with; news- 
papers withheld; visitors denied. Prisoners, he 
urged, were sent to prison for punishment, and 
punished, continually and thoroughly, let them be. 
Punish the man, kill his health, his hope, his spirit, 
his soul, his body too at need, and thus, and only 
thus, reform him. It was a simple plan, and 
likely to bring results of a kind. Shall we be- 
lieve that this man's professions of a change of 
heart are genuine? or feel surprise to discover 
that at the very moment he is receiving visitors 
in his commodious office upstairs, and purring out 
to them his fatherly affection for his prisoners, 



The Men Above 117 

and denying that the old, bad methods of repres- 
sion any longer are tolerated, there are miserable 
wretches being hung up by the wrists in dark and 
noisome cells under his feet? 

Regarding the personnel of the officials at At- 
lanta I can for obvious reasons say little. They 
are a good deal like such officials anywhere. The 
warden is a Pennsylvania Dutchman; the deputy 
a young Kentuckian, gigantic and fresh faced ; his 
first assistant is a stalwart man of middle age, a 
good deal of a martinet, but the men are inclined 
to like him because they see in him a solid, mas- 
culine creature, who stands pat, says what he 
means, and does what he says. Then there are 
the prison doctor, the steward of the commissary 
department, and the parole officer, and under them 
are the guards and the " snitches " the latter not 
being officially recognized, although they wield 
an important influence, their reports against their 
fellow prisoners being seriously considered, and 
often made the basis of action by their superiors, 
which has no small effect upon the welfare of the 
jail. Yet these poor wretches they are mostly 
negroes sell their brethren for a mess of pot- 
tage of secret favors and immunities; none save 
the most abject would accept such employment. 
Could any inspiration or procedure be more inse- 
cure ? Yet it is an essential factor in the present 
principle of prison management. 

The guards are, with some exceptions, such a 



Ii8 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

body of men as might be expected from their 
salary seventy dollars a month, with no raise 
for length of service or meritorious conduct. 
They cannot be rated as high as the average police 
officer, and the conditions amid which they live are 
so unfavorable to manly development that it is 
small wonder they grow worse as they grow older 
in service. They either dislike the men and use 
them accordingly, or they make secret compacts 
with them for surreptitious favors, which under- 
mine discipline and corrupt such morals as prison- 
ers may be supposed to possess. Often, however, 
they will solicit favors from prisoners, and, when 
the latter seek some accommodation in return, 
grin in their face, or austerely threaten to report 
them. Their brutality is sometimes quite whimsi- 
cal and unexpected, the outcome of some per- 
sonal dislike, without bearing on the prisoner's 
conduct, though they are voluble in assigning 
some alleged infraction of the rules, should a su- 
perior happen to call them to account. And the 
superior, I may almost say, never believes the 
prisoner against a guard, or rather, never acts 
upon such belief. That is the settled policy of 
the penitentiary; the warden himself has placed 
himself on record numerous times to the effect that 
under no circumstances would he take the word 
of a prisoner over that of a guard. To be re- 
ported means to be punished, be the report base- 
less or not. It follows naturally that guards 



The Men Above 119 

never scruple to give full rein to any animosity 
they may privately feel against a man, knowing 
that they will be able to " put it across " with the 
higher official to whom complaint may be made. 

I happened to be in the corridor one day when 
one of the guards, a tall, strapping fellow, was 
bringing downstairs a convict of stature much less 
than his own, a poor half demented youth, whose 
dementia was unfortunately wont to express itself 
in foul or abusive language, which came from him 
almost involuntarily, without any particular per- 
sonal application. The two men were half way 
down the final flight of steps, when, without any 
visible pretext, but, I presume, on account of some 
unlucky epithet or utterance let fall by the con- 
vict, the guard suddenly seized the youth violently 
by the throat, hammered his head against the wall, 
and dragged him headlong down the rest of the 
descent. They were now in the corridor; the 
man, bewildered and giddy, was whirled round 
and shoved to the head of another short flight 
of steps leading out to the yard; the door was 
open. The guard came behind him, caught him 
by the collar, and exerting his strength, hurled 
him through the door; he fell prone on the ground, 
and lay there. 

Here, my own view of the incident was cut off; 
but ten minutes afterward I met a comrade, who, 
bristling with wrath, described the continuation 
of the affray, which he had just witnessed. He 



12O The Subterranean Brotherhood 

said that the guard, following the man, grasped 
him by the coat and jerked him off the ground and 
shoved him, staggering, toward the isolation build- 
ing on the other side of the yard. There hap- 
pened to be two visitors, a man and a woman, 
under convoy of another guard, passing at the 
moment; the first guard was by this time too much 
blinded by his own passion to notice them; the 
other laughed, and apparently reassured the 
visitors. Upon nearing the isolation building, a 
third guard, who was on duty at the gate, ran 
up, and struck the prisoner several times on the 
head with his club. The man put up his arms 
in an effort to ward off the blows, or to beg for 
mercy, but without effect ; he was dragged between 
his two assailants to the deputy's office, as if he 
were a dangerous giant struggling to get away, 
though, in fact, he was quite helpless and partly in- 
sensible. From there, as we learned later, he was 
taken to a dark cell, charged with I know not 
what misdeeds, and nothing was ever done to 
either of the licensed ruffians who had mistreated 
him. 

I recall such scenes with reluctance; they are 
ugly things to think of; but some illustrations are 
necessary in order to put in your mind some no- 
tion of what jails mean. An episode which, as it 
turned out, had elements of the ridiculous, but 
which came within a hair's breadth of having very 
fatal consequences, occurred a short time before 



The Men Above 121 

I became an inmate; it is still spoken of with 
emotion by those who participated in it. 

A large number of prisoners, some twenty or 
more, I think, were collected in one of the base- 
ment work-rooms, when a fire broke out there. 
The smoke soon became suffocating, and crept up 
into the ranges above, alarming the whole prison. 
But conditions in the room itself were immediately 
intolerable; the door had been locked, and the 
men were jammed together there, frantically 
shrieking for the door to be opened. Death for 
all of them would be a matter of only a few min- 
utes. The guard in the corridor above, a huge, 
burly personage, with the brains, it would be flat- 
tery to say, of a calf, and exceedingly punctilious in 
his notions, came down the stairs to see what was 
the matter. One of the men shouted out to him, 
forgetting decorum in the desperate hurry of the 
moment, " Why don't you open the door, you 

? " Now, it was not only against 

the rules that the door should be opened between 
certain hours, but it was altogether irregular and 
intolerable to miscall an official. The guard 

stopped short u Who's that called me a ? " 

he demanded indignantly. But there was none to 
answer him, for the men were by that time strang- 
ling and fainting. 

Down the stairs at this juncture came one of 
the higher officials, choking and gasping. " Open 
that door, why don't you?" he managed to call 



122 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

out, seeing the guard below him. " I'm trying to 
find out," replied the latter, " who it was called 

me a ." The higher official was understood 

to say something which penetrated the hide of his 
subordinate, and stirred him at last to action 
not a moment too soon. The door was unlocked, 
and the captives tumbled and crawled out. The 
burly personage, who rated punctilio and seemly 
language above the lives of men, still retains his 
position in the corridor; but the prisoner who had 
insulted his dignity has never been identified. 

But what can be expected of men in the position 
of guards of a prison? The function is abnormal, 
and unless it be undertaken from high motives 
and with an exceptional endowment of intelligence 
and humane feeling, it will steadily deteriorate a 
man; from being at the start to all practical pur- 
poses a social derelict, incompetent for productive 
employment, and often suffering from an incurable 
disease, he will sink lower and lower in the scale 
of manhood and morality. He has two chief 
aims in life to requite himself upon defenseless 
convicts for the kicking-out bestowed upon himself 
by the community; and to get an increase of pay. 

I had not been three days in the prison, when 
one of them came to me in my cell and asked me 
to write for him a letter to the Department urging 
a raise of salary. So be it by all means, if higher 
pay will get better men; but men who can com- 
mand higher pay do not care to do such work. 



The Men Above 123 

Since my guard saw no impropriety in asking for 
it though, of course, it was against the rules 
I wrote his petition for him. The rules governing 
guards are explicit, but so far at least as they re- 
gard treatment of prisoners they are freely dis- 
regarded. For example, guards are forbidden 
by the rules to address prisoners insultingly, to 
apply names or epithets to them, to lay hands upon 
them or to strike them " upon whatever provoca- 
tion " unless they believe their own lives are 
in danger. A rabbit has as much chance of 
throttling a bulldog as the ordinary prisoner of 
endangering the life of a guard; yet hardly a 
prisoner in the penitentiary has not repeatedly 
either undergone or witnessed, or both, insults 
and physical violence offered by guards to the men. 
As to the impropriety of asking favors of the 
men, the guards might plead distinguished prece- 
dent for it. One of the higher officials of the 
penitentiary summoned me to his office one morn- 
ing. He informed me that he intended to devote 
his life to prison work, but that he was still a 
young man, and that advancement was slow and 
difficult. " When you were outside, you lived in 
society, and knew a lot of big men," he was kind 
enough to say; "you will be going out of here 
again before long. If you should find it in your 
way to speak a good word for me in quarters 
where it would be likely to do me good, I should 
appreciate it." I should perhaps have premised, 



124 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

lest he appear in the light of asking something for 
nothing, that he had opened the conversation by 
handing back to me the Ingersoll watch of which 
I had been deprived on entering the institution. 
I knew that my young friend and benefactor was 
deep in the darksome intricacies of prison politics, 
and was just then getting rather the worst of it; 
but I was unable to give him any positive assur- 
ance that my influence with the Department, or 
elsewhere, would suffice to give him a lift. 

Favoritism rules in all parts of the prison ad^ 
ministration; it and prison politics are, indeed, 
twin curses of our whole prison system. In spite 
of all the specious official promises of reward for 
good conduct in the form of parole and obedience 
to the rules, every prisoner knows that they are 
apples of Sodom; the most correct conduct, main- 
tained for years, will gain a man nothing, while a 
worthless and heedless fellow, if he has a friend 
among the men above, will have his way smoothed 
for him. An official's pet snitch enjoys all man- 
ner of indulgences in the way of food and free- 
doms, and if he be an intelligent fellow, he can 
ride on his superior's neck and influence his con- 
duct to a surprising degree. Again, certain 
guards, in the eyes of their superiors, can do no 
wrong whatever wrong they do; and others, who 
are apt to be men who retain some conscientious 
notions as to their duties, find their path difficult. 
Some guards, too, though they may be obnoxious 



The Men Above 125 

to their officers, are not dismissed because they 
know too much, and might reveal uncomfortable 
facts were they cashiered. I could name an ex- 
ample of this a young guard who, a few years 
ago, committed a cold blooded crime upon a con- 
vict, for which in the outside world he would have 
been liable to a hanging. But the prison authori- 
ties did not find it expedient to punish him, and he 
still saunters about the prison, with his cap tilted 
on his head, and his rifle. He is a good shot, and 
is employed a good deal on the towers, where 
quick marksmanship might be useful. He knows 
too much. 

Evil conditions breed evil deeds and dangerous 
secrets. Conditions have improved somewhat dur- 
ing the last two or three years, but the improve- 
ment has been more outward than inward. One 
day, two or three years ago, suddenly appeared at 
the gates the Attorney-General from Washington. 
He had not been looked for so early. He walked 
straight into the dining-room, where he noticed a 
number of convicts standing up with their noses 
against the wall. " What is this for? " he asked 
one of them. The convict couldn't exactly tell; he 
was waiting to be had up for examination. 
"How long are you kept there?" "From 
seven in the morning till seven at night." " Have 
you had anything to eat? " The man had not, 
nor any opportunity to discharge the functions of 
nature either. 



126 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

This Attorney-General, in Washington, had 
never showed himself a friend of convicts; but 
when he saw and smelt ! this comparatively 
slight instance of prison discipline, his gorge rose. 
He ordered all the culprits to the kitchen for a 
meal, and issued an edict against this punishment, 
and against some other things that he discovered. 
What he would have done had he seen the dark 
cells, and the condition of the men who had been 
kept there for a few months, may be conjectured. 
The public is indeed assured that the use of these 
cells has long been discontinued; but seven or eight 
hundred prisoners know that, as late as last Octo- 
ber, a certain convict commonly referred to as " the 
old Englishman " was hung up by the wrists in one 
of them. And there were others. 

Prison officials are political appointees, whose 
controlling aim must therefore be the security and 
prosperity of themselves, and only afterward (if 
at all) the welfare and just and decent treatment 
of the convicts. They have their salaries (nig- 
gardly enough if we regard the work they are sup- 
posed to do, but affluent in view of what they 
actually do), and they have the government ap- 
propriations for expenses and supplies for the 
penitentiary, which they are expected to handle 
economically. But economy, and decent and hu- 
mane treatment of prisoners in a jail, are incom- 
patible, even were the men kept steadily and pro- 
ductively at work under proper conditions, and 



The Men Above 127 

paid for what they produced. A jail properly ad- 
ministered would be one of the most expensive in- 
vestments in the world; but Congress, as at present 
advised, thinks only of cutting down the already 
miserably insufficient stipend; and that warden 
who can, at the end of his fiscal year, show a bal- 
ance in favor of the government, may depend upon 
holding his position, and nobody considers the 
mortal tears, misery and outrage from which that 
favorable balance is derived. For not only if it 
be wisely and honestly expended is the supply of 
money insufficient, but much of it is wasted by 
mere ignorance, negligence and incompetence, and 
much more of it as recent exposures in news- 
papers indicate leaks away in the form of graft. 
For all this waste the convict must pay in priva- 
tions and cruelties not authorized or contemplated 
by a government none too considerate at best; and 
men above grow fat and rosy gilled. 

But nothing is so difficult to prove or so easy to 
conceal as graft; all the ingenuity and resources of 
the grafters are primarily and undeviatingly de- 
voted to covering their tracks. So much is al- 
lowed for maintenance, subsistence, construction; 
the bills and receipts are shown; all seems right. 
And yet, somehow, buildings remain unfinished, 
grounds are a raw wilderness, men are clad in rags 
inherited from previous generations, and are 
starved and abused. Meanwhile, a warden on a 
four or five thousand dollar salary contrives to 



128 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

live at the rate of ten or twelve, and may own 
valuable real estate in the city. 

Do miracles occur in jails, after having been 
so long discontinued elsewhere? Or must we at 
last realize that the comfort and soft living of a 
handful of rascals is obtained at the cost of the 
flesh and blood and despair of thousands of men 
I believe there are five hundred thousand con- 
victs in this country annually gagged and help- 
less, to whom we give the name of convicts, but 
who, whatever their crimes, are still our own flesh 
and blood, brothers of ours, our own very selves 
but for special circumstances for which we can 
claim no merit; but for their souls and lives we are 
responsible, and to strive to redeem and succor 
them our own intelligent self-interest should 
prompt us to spend and labor lavishly. Instead 
of that, our habitual attitude toward them is that 
of indifference or even hostility. For why should 
we honest people waste our good money and 
precious sympathy on a convict? Has he not al- 
ready robbed us enough? 

It would be a shallow thing to hold up as mon- 
sters of hardheartedness and depravity the of- 
ficials who have been entrusted with the conduct 
of our prisons. If they do wickedly and corruptly, 
it is not because they are to begin with preter- 
human sinners, but because we summoned them to 
duties far above their capacity and training, which 
involve temptations and provocations which they 



The Men Above 129 

lack will and power to resist, which give them 
power over fellow creatures which the most mag- 
nanimous and purest men might hesitate to as- 
sume, and which inevitably plunge men who are 
not magnanimous or pure into deeds of injustice, 
dishonor and inhumanity. In a sense, the officials 
are no less victims of the ignorance and frivolity 
of the community than are the prisoners them- 
selves. 

But, at any rate, the officials are few and the 
prisoners are many. If anything is to be done to 
make things better, there is more hope in dealing 
with the officials first. After they have been 
driven out, and their places filled with honorable 
and enlightened men, who will at least administer 
the law as it stands with integrity and judgment, 
we shall be in a better position to consider whether 
the law itself be beyond criticism, and its penalties 
justly and prudently devised. Crime as it exists 
is an enormous evil, and it costs us enormously; 
and cheap and pinchbeck methods will never rid us 
of it. 



VIII 
FOR LIFE 

WHEN a man hears rumors that his appli- 
cation for parole is likely to be acted upon 
favorably, a guard pauses at his cell door some 
morning, and tells him to go to the clothing shop 
at a certain hour. The prisoner, unless he has 
been forewarned, accepts this as proof positive 
that he will really be set at liberty, and presents 
himself before the head tailor with a smiling 
countenance. He is solemnly and specifically 
measured for a suit, looks over the material out 
of which it is to be made, perhaps ventures to 
mention some predilections as to the cut, and 
takes his departure with a light heart. The fact 
that the cloth is cheap, unshrunken goods, which 
will shrivel up at the first shower or severe hu- 
midity, and will, at all events, get wrinkled out of 
shape in a few days, does 'not dash the hopeful 
prisoner's jocundity; nor even the consideration 
that the " prison cut " will be instantly recognized 
all over the country, by every detective, private or 
federal, and acted upon as circumstances may in- 
dicate. It is not the clothes, good or bad, that 
makes his long-tried heart glad; it is the assurance 

130 



For Life 131 

of freedom. He would be more than content with 
a simple loin-cloth, if only freedom might go with 
it 

As a matter of fact, this measuring commonly 
means little, and guarantees nothing at all. In- 
deed, it has rather the appearance of a pleasant 
jest of the authorities one of the cat-and-mouse 
plays with prisoners with which every old timer 
is familiar. One would say the authorities find 
amusement, amid the monotonous round of their 
avocations, in thus stimulating hopes which they 
know are not likely to be fulfilled. " Come, here 
is a heart not yet thoroughly broken; let us try 
another blow at it! " Days, weeks, months, drag 
tediously by, and nothing more is heard of the 
parole, or of the suit of new clothes. They have 
never been made up, or if they by chance have 
been, they are put away to gather dust on a shelf 
underground; they are old clothes now years 
old, sometimes. And when at last they are 
brought out again, it is probable that they will be 
worn by some other, more fortunate man, who 
ignored the misfit for the sake of getting past the 
prison doors. 

When this little drama was acted for my bene- 
fit, I noticed a man sitting in a certain chair amid 
the other tailor prisoners, stitching away perfunc- 
torily at a piece of goods. I call him a man, but 
he looked, to my fancy, like an ancient frog, or the 
semblance of what had once been a frog, from 



132 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

which, however, all the impulses and juices that 
had made him alive had slowly leaked away, un- 
til nothing but the shell was left. He was a 
pithless automaton, in whom mind and emotions 
had long since become inert, and only enough sen- 
sibility was left to enable him to feel dimly miser- 
able. Who was he or, better, who had he 
been? I learned that for seven years he had sat 
in that same chair from morning till night, doing 
the same job of sewing on one suit after another 
of prison clothing. Seven years ! But was he 
capable of no other employment? Might he not 
have been given the relief of a change? Maybe; 
but what would be the use? They couldn't be 
bothered finding him new stunts all the time, since 
he had learned how to do that one thing satis- 
factorily. He was a " lifer." 

Life your entire lifetime means, perhaps, 
a good deal to you ; even its sorrows, in the retro- 
spect, were good in their way; they meant some- 
thing. And you look forward to happier things 
in the future ; it will be a long and on the whole a 
successful future perhaps. Think of the variety 
and the opportunity which this great, multiform, 
breathing world holds forth to a man; the friends, 
the activities, the changes of scene, the surprises, 
the conflicts, success and failure, hope and fear, 
triumph, defeat life, in a word. It is a divine 
thing, a glorious thing, the God-given birthright 
of all men. It is the molding of character, the 



For Life 133 

endless, stimulating struggle, the growing sense 
of human brotherhood, the faces and hands of 
our fellow creatures, the longer, deeper thoughts 
aroused by the slow revelations of experience as 
to the plan of human destiny, and therefore are 
the words well chosen which condemn a man like 
yourself to penal servitude " for life "? 

But human language has no word to convey the 
significance of lifelong imprisonment. It is surely 
not life: nor is it death Oh, death would be 
welcome! For death means either (as you may 
imagine you believe) total extinction, or it means 
increased life, free from material trammels. But 
death in life is a monstrous thing; life, for ex- 
ample, spent in a chair in a squalid tailor's shop, 
doing over and over again the same piece of 
squalid, meaningless work, with ever another 
squalid year stretching out its length before you 
when the last one has been completed. Is life so 
endured life the sacred Creative gift, imparted 
to all things, conscious or unconscious, without 
restriction? Life, the mystery, which we are im- 
potent to bestow, and which even death, self-in- 
flicted or inflicted by others, cannot take away; 
which one thing only can take away the death- 
in-life of penal imprisonment; is it not a formi- 
dable thought that we have incurred the burden of 
this crime, which does not transfer life from one 
phase to another, but seeks to annihilate it abso- 
lutely? 



134 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

Death would be welcome; the infliction of it can 
find forgiveness; but how can we forgive the in- 
fliction of death-in-life? How can God forgive 
it, this profane meddling with sacred and fathom- 
less life? Will He accept the plea that we did 
it " for the protection of society? for the man's 
own good? or a warning to others? " In that 
day of questioning, I would rather take my chances 
with the man sitting in the chair in the prison 
tailor's shop for seven years, a " lifer " ! Infinite 
mercy may find means to compensate him for what 
we robbed him of; but what can it do with us, 
the robbers ? 

In the Federal prison there were a score or 
more of lifers, with some of whom it was my 
fortune to become acquainted. I stood in a sort 
of awe of them; the thought of their fate was so 
overwhelming that my mind could not compass it, 
though my heart might approach some conception 
of it through obscure channels of intuition. Their 
treatment by the prison officials was not ordina- 
rily severe; even a warden or a guard could feel 
that clubbing and dark-celling would be a kind 
of anticlimax for a man sentenced for life. Some 
of them usually negroes would be given 
easy jobs, and not held too strictly to the petty 
regulations whose special object is to humiliate the 
ordinary prisoner, under guise of disciplining and 
reforming him. Nothing was to be gained by 



For Life 135 

disciplining or reforming a " lifer." Others, how- 
ever, in whom despair had taken the expression 
of obstinacy or savagery, were savagely handled; 
one of them bears terrible scars from a shooting 
by one of the guards, and he told me that, out of 
the twenty-two years he had already served, eight 
had been spent in the punishment cells. Others 
are maltreated for a while, experimentally, or to 
" put the fear of God in their hearts," and after- 
ward let alone. But as a rule, there is not much 
fun to be got out of a " lifer " by the prison keep- 
ers, and they prefer to ignore him. 

The introduction of the law allowing the privi- 
lege of applying for parole, did, to be sure, place 
in the hands of the authorities a weapon with 
which they could " get beneath the hide " (as they 
might term it) of these obdurate subjects. Need- 
less to say, this measure, which provides that 
" lifers " may be paroled (at the discretion of the 
parole board) after having served fifteen years 
with a good prison record, did not contemplate 
introducing thereby a new element of misery into 
their lives. But the men to whose hands the 
" lifer " is entrusted found in it a means of making 
him more readily amenable to discipline by hold- 
ing over him the threat of an adverse report 
should he prove intractable. They could keep him 
indefinitely in that state of torturing suspense as 
to his fate, which is perhaps the worst of all tor- 



136 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

tures, by withholding from him all information as 
to whether or not his appeal was likely to suc- 
ceed. 

Several cases of this kind came under my ob- 
servation. In one, the release came before the 
man had collapsed; in others, too late. In only 
one or two that I know of was there any pretext 
that his conduct during imprisonment had been 
unsatisfactory. The delay was never explained; 
it was due to wilful or careless neglect. Two men 
were carried out feet foremost in a deal box after 
they had endured suspense up to the extreme limit 
of mortal capacity. They died of broken hearts 
gradually broken through long months of hope 
slowly fading into despair. 

The warden sat serene in his office, attending 
to business as a good official should, writing re- 
ports to the Department which testified to his 
efficiency and economy, welcoming visitors with his 
genial smile, occasionally reading encomiums upon 
himself in a local newspaper, written and inserted 
there by somebody; the guards sauntered jauntily 
about, cocking their caps and making their clubs 
dance at the end of the cords; eight hundred un- 
sightly felons, who had once been men like you 
and me, filed drearily in to their meals, and out 
again, the worse for the experience; and all the 
while, from morning till night, Dennis sat on the 
corner of his cot in the hospital room, waiting for 
the news of his release. He felt, and said, at 



For Life 137 

first, that it was sure to come; it would come in a 
day or two, or at the end of the week anyway; or 
at the beginning of the week after. He knew his 
application had been accepted; of course, those 
big officials had lots to do, and could not be ex- 
pected to attend to him at once ; but they would not 
forget him. 

For several weeks a month or two Dennis 
kept up his spirits well; he had been in prison many 
years, more than the number required for parole, 
and he had no bad marks against him. His wife 
and two daughters were still living, however, and 
he was full of plans for his future life with them ; 
what he would do, where he would live, how happy 
they all would be together, after that separation. 
But one day as he sat on his cot, or paced slowly 
up and down the hospital chamber, news was 
brought to him, bad news, news that his wife had 
died unexpectedly. 

He survived it; some men survive miraculously 
in prison, and some die easily. Dennis had his 
daughters left to him still; and the release was 
sure to come now they would not surely delay 
it any longer. He had been a tall, powerful mu- 
latto when he first came to prison ; he was a gaunt, 
bent skeleton of a man now, with great, bony, 
strengthless hands, that closed round mine with a 
sort of appealing, lingering pressure when we met, 
as if he feared to let go his hold upon a man who 
was sorry for him. The doctor knew any com- 



138 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

petent physician, at least, might have known 
that he could not last much longer; but the doctor 
said nothing and did nothing. Then for the 
stars in their courses seemed to fight against Den- 
nie came another piece of news for him; not 
news of parole, but news that his daughters, both 
of them, had followed their mother; they too were 
dead. Dennis, who had begun to plan out a life 
with them, to be father and mother both to them, 
to comfort them and work for them, and to die 
at last with their love and companionship com- 
forting him, was now alone in the world, and still 
in prison. 

Time had gone by; it was six months since he 
had begun to look for freedom. What would 
freedom mean for him now, with no one in the 
world to go to or to be with? Probably he gave 
up looking for it at this point; at any rate, he spoke 
of it no more. He spoke very little after that, and 
he very seldom rose from his seat on the corner 
of his cot, or took notice of any one or of anything 
in the hospital room. He sat there, day after day, 
all day long, with his eyes fixed upon a certain 
point of vacancy; what he saw, what he thought, 
no one knew. His hands lay before him on his 
bony knees, lax and inert. Half a lifetime in 
prison, and now he was nearing the end, mute and 
motionless, making no complaint or protest the 
power for that had gone by. He no longer spoke 
of parole; and no parole came. No doubt, the 



For Life 139 

great officials were busy, and what was Dennis that 
they should remember him, and draw out that 
paper from its pigeonhole, and sign it, and send 
it to him? The world could get along without 
Dennis. 

So, one day, Dennis died; and after his body 
had been laid in its box, the old market wagon, 
with the old mule between the shafts, was backed 
up to the door, and the box with the gray old 
corpse in it was shoved in and driven round to 
the prison burying ground and dumped into its red 
clay hole. There it lies; but I am not sure that 
that is the end of Dennis. A time may be com- 
ing, after this earthly show is over, when persons 
who were so much pressed for time that they could 
find no moment to sign a paper to save a fellow 
man's life, may see him again under awkward cir- 
cumstances, and be asked to explain. Justice, after 
all, is an Immortal, and belongs to eternity. We 
should beware of measuring, by the apparent slow- 
ness of her movements on this lower plane, the 
likelihood of her final victory. 

If you have some imagination to spare, put your- 
self in the place of a convict who finds himself, 
to-day, facing a sentence of imprisonment for life. 
The imagination of it, even, is so appalling that 
you will need more than common courage to pic- 
ture it to yourself. What, then, must the reality 
of it be ? It is hard to understand how any human 
heart and brain can withstand the prospect of it. 



140 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

If it has not stopped your heart at once if your 
brain has not immediately collapsed under the 
shock you will think of suicide. But, perhaps, 
before you can find means or resolution to seek 
that escape, you will become conscious, in the back- 
ground of your mind, of a stirring of that almost 
ineradicable thing that we call hope. You cannot 
quite bring yourself to believe that your entire 
earthly future is to be passed in a prison cell. 
Some event will occur, some beneficent freak of 
destiny, some earthquake or lightning bolt, some 
national revolution or catastrophe, some belated 
sense of humanity in your brother man, some new 
law repealing the impious cruelty of the old law, 
that will break your bars before the end can come. 
You cannot believe that you will actually live and 
die in jail. 

Thus you are tided over your first hours and 
days, and with each new day that you survive the 
chances of your surviving altogether increase. By 
and by, you fall into the prison routine, and your 
existence becomes mechanical and automatic. 
There will be occasional flamings-out of rage and 
despair, but they pass, and become progressively 
more infrequent. You have slipped down into 
a merely animal stratum of existence; you live to- 
day because you lived yesterday, and you do not 
forecast to-morrow. Perhaps you learn to assuage 
and deceive the hunger of your immortal soul by 
forcing your attention upon the petty ripple of 



For Life 141 

daily events and duties, until you present, to the 
outsider, the appearance of a commonplace, non- 
tragic person, bearing no noticeable scars of the 
crime which society perpetrated on you. You per- 
haps lose, at last, the realization of your own in- 
human plight, and are received, unawares, into the 
gray prison protoplasm, no longer really sensitive 
to impressions, though presenting the semblance 
of human reactions. You drift down the stream, 
passive, in a sort of ghastly contentment. You 
have forgotten that you ever were a man. 

But I am merely speculating in the direction of 
truths that I do not know and cannot reach. The 
lifers themselves whom I knew could tell me noth- 
ing; they were less demonstrative than the men of 
five or ten years' sentence. We can never fathom 
the dealings of the Almighty with His creatures, 
and they, perhaps, can fathom them as little as we 
can. In ways inconceivable to us, they are sup- 
ported. 

There was a little old man known as Uncle Billy. 
If the parole board has kept faith with him, he 
should have been set free the 23rd of December. 
Uncle Billy's right arm had been amputated at the 
shoulder, the result of a shot through the arm from 
his own gun while he was getting out of a buggy. 
He lived in Oklahoma, Indian Territory, at the 
time of his story. Billy was married to a woman 
who must have had some attractiveness, for a 
journeying pedler, who periodically passed 



142 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

through the region, formed a liaison with her. 
There was at that time a daughter, who had just 
reached marriageable age. The pedler was wont 
practically to put Billy out of his own house during 
his sojourns, and usurped his place as master of the 
household. At one time he secured Billy's con- 
viction on some minor offense, and had him jailed 
for six months. What Billy thought of the situa- 
tion I don't know; he was a small, slight man, 
under five foot three, and of an intellectual cast. 
But he seems not to have attempted active meas- 
ures, until one day he discovered that the pedler, 
not satisfied with the wife, was attempting the se- 
duction of the daughter likewise. 

Then, one night, Billy came to his house, and 
found that going on which his patience could not 
tolerate. He got hold of an ax, and, stealing into 
the room, struck the pedler, as he lay in bed, with 
his one arm, and split his head open. What 
passed then between him and his wife is not known. 
Billy, I believe, was for giving himself up to the 
authorities at once; but the woman prevailed upon 
him to conceal the deed. She tied the body to the 
tail of the horse, and dragged it across the fields 
to a ditch, where she covered it with dirt and rub- 
bish. There it lay for some weeks, until a couple 
of men out hunting saw an end of a suspender 
sticking out of the ground, and pulling at it, dis- 
covered the murdered corpse. Billy confessed, and 
he and his wife were lodged in jail pending their 



For Life 143 

trial. The woman died there ; but Billy was tried 
and convicted, and in consideration of the peculiar 
circumstances, was " let off " with a life sentence. 
When I knew him, he had been in a cell nearly 
fifteen years. 

The weather was chilly; some of the prisoners 
were let out in the yard every day at one o'clock, 
to pace round in a ring for forty minutes. I saw 
the little, bent, thin old man, with one arm, hob- 
bling round and round with his cane. Conversa- 
tion was not permitted under the rules, but the rule 
was often overlooked. After I had gained an 
outline of his story from some old timers, I spoke 
to him, and he looked up at me with a pair of 
singularly intelligent brown eyes, and with a kindly 
expression of his meager little face. We con- 
versed a little on general subjects, and I found 
him well educated, observant, thoughtful, with a 
distinct vein of subdued humor. Afterward I 
saw him in his cell, though there was a rule against 
that, too ; but the guard was tolerant. 

He had a violin there which he had made him- 
self, his tools being a knife made out of a nail 
hammered flat and the edge sharpened, and a 
piece of broken glass. It was admirably fash- 
ioned, and except that it was not varnished, 
would have been taken for such an instrument as 
you buy in a shop ; its tone, too, was pleasing, and 
Billy could discourse excellent music on it. It 
was in the manufacture of these fiddles that his 



144 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

time was passed; the fact that he had but one hand 
' to work with did not embarrass him. His con- 
trivance for playing on the instrument was as re- 
markable as the instrument itself; he had rigged 
up a sort of jury arm of wood and metal, with 
an elbow to it, and a grip to lay hold of the 
bow. Persons who play on violins will doubtless 
be more puzzled than I was to conceive how he 
could do it; but he did it. And for aught I could 
see, he was content with his singular industry; it 
gave him constant occupation and enabled him, 
I suppose, to keep thoughts of other things out of 
the way. Otherwise, he was utterly unobtrusive, 
almost invisible, and the guards let him alone. 
But the government of the United States had kept 
him there for fifteen years, as a menace to society. 
You can see him in fancy, had he been set free for 
doing what most human beings must have done, 
ranging up and down the country, dealing out 
terror and slaughter. Such wild beasts must be 
restrained. They must be disciplined and re- 
formed, and jail is the way to do it. 

Just before I left the jail, I spoke to Billy about 
his parole. " You and I will get out almost to- 
gether," I said. " No, no," he replied, with his 
curious little humorous smile, " they can't get rid 
of me as easy as that; I've got three months yet, 
and I'm going to stick it out to the end." I have 
not heard the sequel; but I can hardly believe that 



For Life 145 

the authorities mean to play the cat-and-mouse 
game with him. 

I have perhaps mentioned John Ross, who died, 
under promise of parole, after thirty-three years 
behind the bars. And there was Thomas Bram, 
a prisoner hardly less remarkable, freed on parole 
after seventeen years' confinement. He had per- 
sistently asserted his innocence from the first, and 
nobody so far as I know doubted his assertion. 
The evidence against him was entirely circum- 
stantial, and there was another man in the case 
who seemed, to judge by the reports of the trial, 
to have been at least as likely to be guilty. Bram's 
record in prison was wholly blameless, and though 
there was some opposition to freeing him, it sufficed 
only to obtain a delay of a few weeks beyond the 
date set for his release. But during those few 
weeks, his sufferings were trying to witness, and he 
was near collapse before the end came. He told 
me that the Attorney-General had personally 
promised him freedom two years before, but had 
done nothing toward keeping his promise. " It 
wasn't right, Mr. Hawthorne," was all the com- 
ment he allowed himself to make. Bram's self- 
control was great, and his manner always soft and 
ingratiating; he was politic and prudent, and had 
probably resolved from the outset of his prison 
career to obtain pardon or mitigation if good con- 
duct and unfaltering adherence to his plea of in- 



146 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

nocence could compass it. He was given a job 
which procured him some indulgences, and was 
never punished. But if a life sentence for a guilty 
man be intolerable, what shall be said if lie were 
guiltless ? Think it over in your leisure moments. 

I find my list is far too long to be dismissed 
in one chapter; and in cases where the men are 
still in confinement, discussion of them might prove 
injurious. There was a young fellow there who 
looked like a slender boy of seventeen; he was 
really over thirty years of age. But he had been 
imprisoned since his fifteenth year, and his face 
since then had not developed or taken the contours 
of manhood; and his manner was boyish. He 
was well educated in the grammar school sense, 
however, though I believe he had picked up most 
of what he knew in prison. He had a distinct, 
emphatic way of speaking, and believed, I fancy, 
that he was quite a man of the world, though, of 
course, he was almost totally devoid of other than 
prison experience. He would have been an in- 
teresting study, had not the pathos of his condi- 
tion, of which he was himself unaware, made one 
shrink from probing it. 

He had killed a man at the instigation of and 
under the influence of a step-father, who wished 
the man removed for ends of his own, and forced 
the child (he was nothing else) to take the job 
off his hands, and the law of Indian Territory, 
which was the scene of the affair, condemned him 



For Life 147 

for life. After serving fifteen years, he applied 
for his parole under the law; there appeared to 
be no grounds so far as his prison record went 
for denying it; nevertheless, he was rejected. He 
asked the reason, and was told that it was not 
considered safe to set him at liberty; he had a 
" bad temper " that was, I think, the explana- 
tion. 

Psychological insight is a good thing in its way 
and place, but it may be carried too far, or em- 
ployed amiss; and this looks like an illustration. 
The boy, in more than fifteen years, had never 
done anything in prison that called for discipline; 
but because some self-constituted and arbitrary 
psychologist chose to believe, or to say, that his 
temper was not under full control, he was doomed 
to spend the rest of his life in a cell. This 
prisoner knows, of course, that he has been 
wronged, but he does not know how much; he 
does not know what life in a world of free men 
is. But he, after being kept for half of his life- 
time under duress, must submit to the caprice of 
a man to whom the country has entrusted abso- 
lute power. No man is qualified to exercise ab- 
solute power; no man is justified in accepting it; 
but we bestow it upon every chance political ap- 
pointee, and what he does with it puts us to shame, 
whether or not we can as yet realize it. 

There was at least one life prisoner in Atlanta 
who merits a chapter to himself; but I cannot 



148 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

speak of him now. He is one of the unrecon- 
ciled, and his horoscope is still too cloudy to make 
it safe to tell his story. A desperate criminal, he 
would be termed by prison experts. In truth, he 
is a warm-hearted, generous, high minded man, 
sentenced to death in his boyhood for a deed which 
would have been properly punished by a few 
months in a reformatory, afterward obtaining a 
commutation to life imprisonment, and now a 
man of more than forty years, bearing upon his 
body terrible scars of severities practised upon him 
for trying to resist wrongs which no manly man 
could tamely endure. A Balzac might find in 
him a more human and lovable Vautrin; a Victor 
Hugo could make him the hero of another Les 
Miserable*; a Charles Reade could win new re- 
nown by summoning us to put ourselves in his 
place. But the best service I can do him now is 
to give him silence. He is not quite desperate 
yet; should he become so, the world will know 
his history. 



IX 
THE TOIL OF SLAVERY 

BEFORE the Civil War there were some mil- 
lions of negro slaves in the South, whom to 
set free we spent some billions of dollars and sev- 
eral hundred thousand lives. It was held that 
the result was worth the cost. But to-day we are 
creating some five hundred thousand slaves, white 
and black, each year or that is about the num- 
ber of made slaves each year in the United States; 
it costs us several millions to keep them in an en- 
slaved condition, and their depredations upon 
society, before and after slavery, amount to sev- 
eral millions more. I have not the precise data, 
but the figures hazarded are not excessive. A 
sound statistician would make a more sensational 
showing; and when he proceeded to cast up his 
account for the aggregate of the years since the 
war, and of the estimated amounts for the coming 
fifty years, the bill would look large even with a 
hundred million paymasters to foot it. 

In that bill, probably the smallest item would 
be the cost of crime itself the actual loss caused 
to the community by the thieving of thieves, of 

149 



150 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

the thieves, that is, who have been convicted and 
condemned as such; for there is no way of figur- 
ing on how much the undetected thieves steal. 
Every time we shake the social body, in this or 
that spasm of probing and reform, hundreds drop 
out, like moths from an unprotected garment; so 
that at last we are prone to suspect that the thief, 
overt or covert, is more the rule than the excep- 
tion, and that a good part of the cash in circulation 
was more or less dishonestly come by. But, leav- 
ing this aside, the money or values appropriated 
by thieves accredited as such and sent to jail, is 
an amount relatively inconsiderable, and by no 
means enough to pay the expenses of their appre- 
hension, trial, and prison sojourn. It is, then, 
politically uneconomical to imprison them. 

The reply to this is, of course, that penal slav- 
ery is preventive of crime; that if we did not 
prosecute malefactors, crime would multiply and 
abound, like weeds in a neglected garden. Per- 
haps it would; but the point is, that it multiplies 
and abounds even in the teeth of prosecutions; 
every year the number of convictions is greater, 
and the jails are already cracking their seams 
to contain the convicts. One might almost con- 
clude that prisons, as now administered, stimulate 
crime instead of preventing it, and that we are 
in the predicament of Hercules in the fable, who, 
as fast as he cut off a head of the hydra, saw two 
others sprout in its place. At which rate, we 



The Toil of Slavery 151 

might be led on to the surmise that it would be 
financially cheaper to let crime run on; the cost of 
our futile efforts to stop it would be saved, and 
might be set over against the loss from the in- 
creased annual depredations. 

But finance is not the whole story; what about 
morality? and who can forecast the ruin of an- 
archy? The problem cannot be so crudely solved. 

Crime must be prevented; doubtless ninje-tenths 
even of the men in jail would agree to that 
proposition. The question is, can the jail system 
prevent it? and the answer is that, judged by long 
experience the experience of thousands of years 
it cannot. There are several reasons why it 
cannot, into some of which we may enquire later; 
but the objection to the jail system which I wish 
to emphasize just now is, that it not only makes 
slaves of convicts, but, unlike the more reasonable 
southern negro slavery, it makes them unproduc- 
tive slaves. Either it withholds this vast body of 
men from production altogether, or else it forces 
them to toil under conditions which bring forth 
results the smallest possible and the most unsatis- 
factory. The men are not paid for what they 
do. Whatever profit (in "contract" prisons) 
accrues from their toil goes into the pockets of the 
contractors, or, perhaps, is used to defray the cost 
of their keep to the community. Or, again, if it 
is made to appear to go into the prisoners' pockets, 
it is deftly taken out again the next moment by an 



152 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

ingenious system of fines, which no prisoner can 
escape. 

In short, prison labor is slave labor, and slave 
labor of a worse kind than was ever practised in 
negro slavery times. For on southern planta- 
tions, though slaves were not paid wages, they got 
wages' worth in good food and lodging, and (uni- 
formly) in humane treatment, including, above all, 
the companionship of their wives and families; 
and they were able, in many instances, to buy 
themselves into freedom. Most of the negroes, 
moreover, had never known what it was to be free ; 
their race, for generations unknown, had been 
slaves in their own country; they had never been 
free citizens of the United States, never had educa- 
tion, were unconscious of any disgrace in their con- 
dition, and were as happy as ever in their lives 
they had been or were capable of being hap- 
pier, indeed, than most negroes are in the com- 
munity to-day. In all respects their condition 
compares favorably with that of our half million 
annual prison slaves, manufactured deliberately 
out of our own flesh and blood. 

I used to contemplate the population in the At- 
lanta Penitentiary the eight hundred of us 
and then look at the construction work, the 
gardening, the tailoring, the carpentering, the pro- 
duct of the forge, the farming in the prison 
grounds outside the walls, and the work of clear- 
ing and grading on the area which the walls en- 



The Toil of Slavery 153 

closed, and I marveled at the disproportion. 
Eight hundred men, many of them skilled in this 
or that industrial employment, most of them 
physically capable of active labor, and almost all 
of them eager to work if given intelligent and use- 
ful work to do; not a few, too, intellectually and 
educationally equipped to plan and direct indus- 
trial operations; and yet, with all this great po- 
tential force at command, all that was actually 
accomplished might have been done as well or 
better by a corporal's guard of willing and well 
managed men. The mere economic waste of such 
material was criminal, without regard to the evil 
effect of inadequate or misapplied labor upon the 
men's moral and mental state. Can it be, I asked 
myself, that this extravagant idleness is forced 
upon the prisoners as part, and not the least evil 
part of their punishment? Or is it the result of 
ignorance, incompetence, or indifference on the 
part of those appointed and paid to take care of 
men sentenced to u hard labor "? 

That the men suffer from it is beyond question. 
And I cannot find that the law provides or intends 
that their suffering shall be of this kind. Much 
of the insanity in the prison is due to the way 
they are made, or made not, to work. There is 
a legend of a warden who, being unable to keep 
his prisoners otherwise busy, set them to piling up 
paving stones on one side of the yard, and then 
taking down the pile and repiling it on the other 



154 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

side. After a week of this, most of them were 
maniacs. It was not the severity of the labor that 
destroyed their minds, but the uselessness and ob- 
jectlessness of it. Sane men require reasonable 
employment; idleness, or irrational work disinte- 
grates their minds. They want to see and to 
foresee intelligible results from their toil; mere 
toil without such results is maddening, or it rots 
men's minds as scurvy rots their bodies. The 
reason is, that the men are human; and if you have 
hitherto supposed that convicts are not human, 
the insanity which so constantly follows upon 
prison idleness or mis-employment should correct 
you. 

Others may describe the horrors, almost inde- 
scribable, of contract labor in prisons; I saw noth- 
ing of that at Atlanta type of another wide- 
spread system of prison work though I heard 
enough about it from men who had undergone it in 
state prisons. But during the few first days of my 
imprisonment, I saw a building gang at work (to 
call it work) upon a new wing destined to contain 
dormitories for the inmates. It was to be a 
seemly structure of granite, massive and well pro- 
portioned. But after three days, work on it was 
stopped, and was not resumed until a week or so 
before I left this prison, six months later. Mean- 
while, I read in the Congressional Record the re- 
port of a debate in the House, in which, on the 
authority of a Texas representative, charges of 



The Toil of Slavery 155 

graft or waste were laid against persons concerned 
in the erection of this building which seemed in- 
credible, but of which I was able to find no refuta- 
tion. The hospital building is open to the same 
criticism, and another, which I believe is designed 
to be the laundry, had got no further, at the date 
of my arrival, than a square hole in the ground, 
and when I left had been furthered by a single 
course of stone or cement laid round the hole. A 
New York contractor, graft or no graft, would 
have had all three of them finished and in com- 
mission in the same time, and with no better 
material in the way of laborers than our prison 
could supply. 

The thirty-four foot wall surrounding the build- 
ings, a mile in circuit, built of cement, had been 
completed before my time. I read in a report of 
the warden's that its existence was due to his enter- 
prise, and that he looked upon it as a worthy 
monument to his activity and intelligence. At 
every hundred yards or so of its length it was 
strengthened by a tower, containing accommoda- 
tions for a guard, day and night, who watches with 
his rifle in hand, ready to shoot down any prisoner 
who seems to be acting suspiciously. No such 
shooting by a tower guard has as yet taken place 
to my knowledge, and none ever will on the pre- 
text suggested; for the wall is absolutely unscala- 
ble ; being five or six feet thick, it is impenetrable, 
and its foundations going down six or eight feet 



156 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

below ground, it cannot be beaten by tunneling; 
yet the towers and the guards are there. 

But the point is that the wall itself is quite pre- 
posterous and unnecessary. Escape for prisoners 
was quite as difficult before it was built as after. 
There are a hundred guards in the penitentiary 
one for every eight prisoners all armed and 
eager for action; every article of a prisoner's 
clothing bears the prison mark; and the population 
outside the walls is penetrated with the idea that 
the apprehension of escaping prisoners is morally 
as well as financially profitable. Every prisoner 
knows that an attempt to escape would be suicide 
" you might get hurt," as the prison rule book 
euphemistically phrases it and they generally 
prefer suicide in some other form. 

The wall, then, is superfluous ; a fence of electri- 
fied wire would have served as good a purpose 
at about one-thousandth of one per cent, of the 
cost. And what did the wall cost? Let the 
prison archives declare. And then, perhaps, it 
would be interesting to investigate the discrepancy, 
if any exist, between the price which the United 
States paid for the work, and the actual cost of 
erecting it. 

The wall was some time in the building, but 
it seems to have been the only thing built in the 
prison, work upon which was continuous and 
energetic. And it was a useless work, better left 



The Toil of Slavery 157 

undone. The warden was proud of it, however, 
and there it stands. 

As for the twenty-seven acre enclosure, in which 
the prison buildings are, which is according to 
official prognostics to be graded, leveled, 
drained, cultivated and planted till it looks like 
a private millionaire's park, it is a raw, rough un- 
sightly waste of red clay and weeds, gouged out 
here and there with random and meaningless ex- 
cavations, heaped up in other places with piles of 
earth; diversified in one quarter with some for- 
lorn chicken coops and fences, made by the volun- 
tary and unskilled labor of one of the convicts; 
and adjoining these, with the Tuberculosis Camp, 
a row of a dozen or more tents mounted on 
wooden platforms, with little flower beds in front 
and behind, and a pigeon house at one end. The 
only part of these grounds on which any visible 
thought and labor has been expended is the base- 
ball diamond, adjoining the northeast corner of 
the wall. Here, the ground has been leveled and 
smoothed over a space sufficient to include the 
diamond itself, and a few yards on its south and 
north sides; beyond that is waste ground, and 
along the northern boundary is a parapet of earth 
five or six feet high, presumably made of the 
material scraped off the diamond. A ball vigor- 
ously struck by a batter either goes over this para- 
pet into the swamp ground beyond, or sails away 



158 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

toward the Tuberculosis Camp, to be retrieved 
from the weeds and rubbish in that vicinity. 

There are some forty score men behind the bars 
who would rejoice to be allowed to put these 
grounds in order, and who, under proper guidance, 
could do the job in a month. It would be a use- 
ful work, it would benefit the men both in the 
doing and in the accomplishment, and it would 
be an excellent advertisement of the penitentiary 
for the visitors who daily stroll about the en- 
closure; yet months and years go by and nothing 
whatever is changed. 

One day, in midsummer, I saw a gang of ne- 
groes digging a trench in front of the southern 
gate, and cutting out a heavy growth of weeds 
and underbrush on the slope above. Drain pipes 
were carted out and dumped in the vicinity of the 
trench, and three or four of them were laid down 
in it. This went on for three or four days, the 
whole gang of ten or a dozen men not achieving 
in that period more than one or two capable Irish 
or Italian navvies would have done in the same 
time. Then the gang disappeared; the open 
trench and the pipes remained in statu quo, and 
the weeds gradually resumed their ancient sway. 
So far as I know, work has not been resumed there 
since. 

It is a typical example; even such work as is 
done, is done in such a discontinuous and futile 
way that it is impossible for any one doing it to 



The Toil of Slavery 159 

feel any interest in it, or stimulus to do it well. 
Time, toil and money are frittered away, with 
nothing definite or substantial to show for it. 
Intermittent and barren tasks are doubly onerous. 
The overseers may not be to blame ; they may be 
incompetent; they may be hampered by the ig- 
norance, incompetence or voluntary policy of the 
prison authorities; the consequences, at all events, 
are disastrous. If a handful of hearty, clever, 
driving men were given control of the various in- 
dustrial operations in the prison, the results would 
seem magical. 

There is dry rot or something worse every- 
where ; and it is difficult to believe that anything is 
gained by it either for the convict or for the coun- 
try. It is to be sure punishment for the former, 
and a bad form of punishment, but it would be 
grotesque to assume that it is inflicted by design 
of our lawmakers. It cannot be that the govern- 
ment deliberately proposes to destroy convicts, 
mind and body; on the contrary, we must suppose 
that it wishes to reform them and render them 
again useful agents in the community. There is 
no way to do this better than to give them honest 
and productive work while in jail, so that they 
may acquire the habit of such work, and be en- 
couraged to pursue it when they get out. 

But in order to induce them to work eco- 
nomically, it is indispensable to give them con- 
tinuous, intelligent, and manifestly useful work, 



160 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

and to pay them for doing it. It can be and it is 
done in some jails even now. Warden Fenton, 
of the Nebraska State Prison, has been putting his 
men on the honor system, and sending squads of 
them out to work on farms or for contractors, 
without guards or other precautions, sometimes 
for weeks at a time; all he asks of them is their 
promise to return when the job is done, which 
they uniformly do. And for this work, he causes 
them to be regularly paid; he retains their wages 
for them until the term of their imprisonment has 
expired, and then hands it back to them. The 
men are encouraged and inspirited by this treat- 
ment, and the neighbors among whom their work 
is done, seem disposed to take a helpful and 
cooperative view of the enterprise. If the neigh- 
bors the community loses nothing by this 
system, and if the convicts gain by it, why should 
it not be made the general practise? Convicts in 
Nebraska are the same sort of people as those 
in Atlanta. 

Warden Fenton is progressive, but most other 
wardens are not, and there is no certainty that 
future wardens of Nebraska prisons will be; there- 
fore he has not solved the problem for good and 
all; something more than the benevolent or wise 
ideas of any individual is needed for that. Mr. 
Fenton has absolute power power, therefore, to 
give or withhold favors as he may choose. En- 
lightened legislation would deprive him and other 



The Toil of Slavery 161 

wardens of absolute power, and make it manda- 
tory to treat prisoners as he is doing it voluntarily. 

Moreover, if men will go off and work without 
guards for three weeks at a stretch, and then re- 
turn uncompelled to the prison, what is the use 
of* making them return to the prison at all, or of 
having any prison for them to return to ? Is not 
their conviction prison enough for most of them? 
And for such as prove incorrigible, or are criminal 
degenerates, ought not pathological care, instead 
of penal slavery, to be provided? Professor 
Marchiafava, physician to the Pope, said recently, 
" Eighty per cent of youthful criminals are chil- 
dren of drunkards." That is a serious indictment 
of alcohol; but it indicts no less the policy which 
punishes victims of disease as if they were de- 
liberate and freely choosing malefactors. 

But leaving sick folk out of the argument, I say 
that, in view of Mr. Fenton's experiment, and 
others like it, conviction is prison enough for most 
persons who have slipped a cog in their moral 
machinery. Means could readily be found to 
make such persons recognizable at need, and they 
would have as great a stimulus to render them- 
selves free from that stigma as they have now, 
and far better opportunities for doing it. They 
would have their families with them, or within 
touch, and they would no longer be slaves; and if 
they had been slaves to their own passions and 
propensities, the expediency of breaking such 



162 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

chains would become far more obvious than it 
ever can be when a guard and a warden is always 
round the corner waiting to club or dungeon them 
for infringement of a whimsical prison rule. It 
does not help a man to his manhood to see his 
keepers acting constantly the part of tyrants and 
torturers. 

This is perhaps a novel doctrine, because, as 
the editorial writer in the Saturday Evening Post 
remarked the other day, " The truth is that, at 
least two times out of three, we send a man to 
jail because we do not know anything rational to 
do with him, and will not take the pains to find 
out." We lack imagination to devise more ef- 
fective treatment, and we are wonderfully ig- 
norant as to what prison treatment really means. 
And this indictment lies not only against the public 
at large, but against the Department of Justice and 
the Congress, who pass their judgments and inflict 
their penalties without in the least understanding 
what they are doing to human bodies and souls 
like their own. 

Jail is the conventional and time-honored nos- 
trum, which is administered with a glow of moral 
self-esteem, and no more thought about it. When 
a murderer is sent to jail for life, or a bank burglar 
or white slaver or financial crook for his specified 
term, do we not sit back in our chairs and clear 
our throats with a self-satisfied " hem ! " and 
4 There's one scoundrel has got his deserts, any- 



The Toil of Slavery 163 

way ! " Had it been your brother, father, son, or 
yourself, would you employ such language? 
Would you not rather say, " If the whole truth 
were known, this could not have happened ?" 
But every case is a special case to the victim. 
And which of us who has not been a convict in 
prison has the right to declare that prison is the 
" desert " of any man? We do not know what 
we are talking about. 

I was looking out of the window of the Isola- 
tion Building one day, with the runner, Ned, be- 
side me; I did my writing there, and he was 
assigned for duty to the same building. Ned, to 
whom I have already referred, was a thoughtful 
young man, and often said a word that went to 
the center of the subject. We had no business, of 
course, to be conversing together, but the guard 
was absent for the moment. We were watching 
the convicts form in the yard for the march to 
their several places of occupation; there was a 
double row of them down there in front of us 
being marshaled to go to the stone-shed, about 
fifty yards away. There they would remain till 
evening, chipping away at blocks of granite, and 
breathing the dust created by their labor. 

The stone-shed men were mostly recruited from 
the so-called hard cases among the convicts; the 
work was hard, and rapid-fire guards were gen- 
erally picked to take care of them. A man had 
been shot to death there about five years before 



164 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

by a guard, on no better grounds than that the 
man had not moved quickly enough in response to 
an order. No action against the guard was taken, 
and he is still on duty in the prison; perhaps he 
knows too much. The stone-shed men prepare 
the stone used in the construction of the buildings 
already mentioned; and they are also employed 
at times, by no regulation to be found in any of 
the books, to do odd jobs for members of the 
prison force ; as when, for example, they were re- 
quired to turn out a monument for the wife or 
other relative of a guard who had died, and for 
whom he was unable to provide a suitable me- 
morial at his own expense. For whatever pur- 
pose the stone work is done, legitimate or illegiti- 
mate, the workers are not enthusiastic about it, 
and probably not many of them will live long 
enough, at least in prison, to see their handiwork 
in practical use. 

Arrayed near them was another file, destined to 
work on the grounds belonging to the prison out- 
side the warden's famous wall, where turnips, 
potatoes, corn and other vegetables are grown. 
The vegetables grow it can hardly be said that 
they are cultivated; I don't know what a New 
York market gardener would say to them. They 
grow, and in due season some of them appear on 
the prison table; others do not appear, but whether 
they are left to rot in the ground, or are put to 
a more remunerative use, I do not personally 



The Toil of Slavery 165 

know. There is no great enthusiasm among the 
gardeners, either. 

Suddenly, Ned groaned out, " Oh, the aimless- 
ness of it! Why don't you write a piece in our 
paper about the aimlessness of prison work? 
Aimless that's what it is! How can a fellow 
feel interested in what he's doing, when he never 
knows what he's doing it for, or what becomes 
of it when it's done let alone that he isn't paid 
for it? Aimlessness that's what we get here 
in prison, and that's all we learn here. Did you 
ever think what a prison would be if there was 
any common sense aim in anything? Those fel- 
lows could make this place the finest thing you 
could imagine, if they were taken hold of by 
somebody with common sense, and put on jobs that 
had any sense in them. But they are kept 
dawdling around, and never know where they're 
at. It kills 'em that's what it does ! You'd 
think a criminal would be taught anything but aim- 
lessness; it was aimlessness that got him here in 
the first place, nine times out of ten. 

" Why, take what goes on in the printing office 
that you were assigned to, for instance," he went 
on, with a sidelong grin at me. " You have a 
month to get out the paper, four to six pages large 
quarto. How long would it take to do that stunt 
in New York?" 

" I suppose it could be done in twenty-four 
hours," I admitted. 



166 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

" Yes, and there are six men down there, and 
they have thirty times twenty-four hours. They 
are in a cellar underground, with the air that 
hasn't been changed in years, and the heat-pipes 
making it worse. Their health can't stand it 
you know that but there they've got to stay 
every day from eight till half after four, pottering 
round with their types and proofs and stuff, and 
trying to drag it along till time's up what's the 
good of it to anybody? It's the same every- 
where ; look at the tailorshop ! Those fellows sit 
and fool around there, with the guard slinging 
language at 'em every few minutes, and taking 
an hour to sew a hem six inches long; and all the 
time here's you and me wearing clothes that were 
new maybe five or six years ago, as you may see 
by the numbers that have been stamped on your 
back and then blotted out, and were worn, since 
then, by some poor devil with tuberculous trouble 
or worse; but they'll be worn out for fair before 
we get any others. Why, look at your pants ! 
They're split all down the leg, and there's your 
knee sticking out of the hole! The prison au- 
thorities call that economy, may be; what do you 
call it?" 

I said that I was not competing for the glass of 
fashion just then. Ned offered to sew up the rent 
for me, but I said that the safety-pin now on duty 
would suffice. He still had some of his theme left 
in him, and he went on: 



The Toil of Slavery 167 

" Look at that power house, that's kept going 
night and day, the year round, with coal at gov- 
ernment expense, running all sorts of machinery, 
and what do they get out of it? I was in the 
carpenter's shop the other day, and there was 
all kinds of machines going, lathes, and I don't 
know what; you'd think by the noise of them they 
was building the Ark at least. But I nosied 
round, and couldn't find anybody that seemed to 
be working much. At last I came to one of the 
big steam lathes, and there was a man that looked 
to be busy about something, so I went up to watch 
him. Well, what do you think he was doing? 
He was making one of these here little sticks that 
a fellow cleans his nails with ! The power house 
was burning tons of coal, and everything hum- 
ming, and that was what came out of it all. A 
nail stick! What do you think of that? " 

No doubt there was rhetorical exaggeration 
about this; but Ned's arraignment was on the 
whole not devoid of justification. There are 
abundant means in the prison for carrying on use- 
ful and energetic work, but they are not properly 
employed. Neither the convicts nor the com- 
munity benefits by it. 

Not that it is wholly without benefit to anybody, 
either. Good clothes are made in the tailor shop, 
but they are not worn by convicts. At least one 
excellent dwelling house has been made by pris- 
oners, but it is occupied by a high prison official. 



i68 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

Unexceptionable meals are cooked in the convict 
kitchen, but convicts do not eat them. There 
is an admirable and productive kitchen garden 
attached to the prison, but its contents neVer ap- 
pear on convict tables. There is a fine lawn, 
diversified with brilliant flower-beds, in front of 
the main prison building, and 'it is greatly admired 
by visitors and passers-by; but the convict sees it 
twice only during his term once when he is 
brought into the prison, and again when he is led 
out. On neither occasion is he, perhaps, in the 
best mood to profit by it. Perhaps the prison 
officials do profit by it; but if so, the results are 
not seen in their intercourse with the prisoners. 
There is nothing flower-like in that. 

Idleness is an evil thing; purposeless work is 
idleness in another and worse form. Aimlessness, 
as my friend Ned said, is a miserable state for a 
man; it tortures him in prison, and the habit of it, 
acquired in prison, cripples and degrades him after 
he gets out. Contract labor is a crime which is 
getting recognized as such; it disgraces the nation 
or the state which tolerates it, and the shame of it, 
if not its immorality, may lead to its general sup- 
pression. Unpaid convict labor for the state, as 
on roads and so forth, is better than private con- 
tract labor, but is also a disgrace to the employer 
a contemptible saving of pennies at the cost of 
human souls. Honest work is a manly thing, and 
those who do it should be treated like men, and 



The Toil of Slavery 169 

as laborers worthy of their hire. Because we have 
rendered them helpless to demand their rights is 
no excuse for denying them. It is cheap, but 
shameful, and can only teach them that the com- 
munity can be as dishonest as the veriest thief of 
them all. 

But a system of work of which that at Atlanta is 
a type (and, alas! the type is far too numerous) 
is anomalous and abominable; it is aimless, and 
abhorrent to man, God and devil alike. It is dif- 
ficult to absolve such a prison from the charge of 
being run at the expense of prisoners, for the 
benefit of its officials, since they alone appear to 
prosper by it. 



X 

OUR BROTHER'S KEEPER 

TIGERS love their cubs, hens their chickens, 
dogs love their masters and all these will 
fight and die in defense of what they love. Hu- 
man mothers generally love their offspring. Love 
in the common sense is common or instinctive, and 
involves no moral quality. It is love of one's own, 
and contains a better form of self love. 

But mercy is of higher birth. Animals know 
nothing of it; sav'ages and the lower types of man 
ignore it. We ascribe a divine source to it when 
we pray God to have mercy on us ; we do not ask 
Him to love us. All higher religions enjoin it. 
Mercy is love purified from self, or wholly altru- 
istic. It is a man loving another not because of 
blood relationship, or because of expected benefits, 
or even because of benefits bestowed, but on the 
simple ground that he is his human brother, child 
of the same Divine Father. It is purer than the 
racial feeling, and it includes the animal creation 
outside humanity in its scope as the Bible puts 
it, " the merciful man is merciful to his beast." 

It is the Golden Rule in manifestation ; we see in 
the one to whom we are merciful ourself in an- 
other form, under different conditions, and we do 

170 



Our Brother's Keeper 171 

to him as we would have him do to us. It seems 
to require a certain maturity of mind, acquired or 
inherited; children below puberty seldom have it. 
It is easily forfeited, and indifference to the suffer- 
ing of others is readily established. It is to be 
guarded and developed as a sacred possession of 
man at his highest, and constantly nourished by 
thought and deed. And no man is so high and 
strong but he may and does need the mercy of 
some being loftier and more powerful than him- 
self, which he cannot claim if he have not himself 
done mercifully to those below him. 

I have remarked heretofore that officials of 
prisons should be men of the highest character in 
the state at least as high as what we would wish 
to ascribe to our judges of the criminal bench. 
Judges send men to prison; but prison guards and 
wardens have charge of them during their im- 
prisonment, with powers practically unlimited. 
Unlimited power is a trust too arduous for any 
mortal, for it should presuppose perfect knowl- 
edge, all-penetrating intelligence, boundless experi- 
ence, and the mercy which is born of these for 
there is a bastard brother of mercy which is of the 
parentage of ignorance and cowardice, which 
shrinks from the sight of suffering from mere pusil- 
lanimity of the nerves, and does not recognize that 
suffering may be mercifully inflicted or permitted 
and beneficently endured. 



172 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

But the community does not select its prison 
officials on the basis above indicated; it is satisfied 
if they be competent to "handle men," have a 
sagacious familiarity with human depravity, will 
tolerate no nonsense, can indict plausible reports 
for the Department, and show a good balance at 
the end of the fiscal year, or, as guards and under- 
strappers, keep the men submissive and orderly 
and allow no outbreaks. As for knowledge, a 
public school education is ample, with such intel- 
ligence as may be supposed to go with it; and the 
experience of a ward heeler or a thug will ordi- 
narily suffice to pass a candidate. As a matter of 
fact, the community never knows anything about 
its prison officials until some special scandal tran- 
spires under their administration, or unless some 
heaven-sent phoenix of a warden unaccountably 
manifests humane and enlightened tendencies. 
Their appointment is left to the political machine, 
which hands it out on the principle of what is he, or 
was he worth to us? As for justice and mercy 
my good sir, you seem to forget we are talking of 
convicted criminals ! 

I affirm, however, that justice which is in- 
telligent mercy is required nowhere so urgently 
as with convicts ; that any punishment which aims 
at more than restraining convicts from practises 
calculated to injure their own best interests, is a 
crime ; and that cruelty to persons imprisoned and 
helpless, be the plea in extenuation of it what it 



Our Brother's Keeper 173 

may, is damnable and unpardonable wickedness. 
Meanwhile, there is not and has never been in the 
United States a jail in which revengeful, malicious 
and unjustifiable punishments have not been in- 
flicted, and in which cruelty does not stain the 
record of each year and day. 

There have appeared lately in the newspapers 
stories of enormities perpetrated in Russian pris- 
ons. Terrible barbarians, those Russians! Yet, 
barring one feature of them only, they can be 
paralleled by what is currently done in prisons 
here. This one feature, is the absence in the 
Russian infernos of all hypocritical protestations 
to the public of humane treatment and of aversion 
from severities. The Russian cannot do more 
than beat, torture and kill his prisoners; but we do 
the same. It is done at Blackwell's Island, at 
Sing Sing, at Auburn, at Jefferson City, at Leaven- 
worth (until the other day at least), in San Quen- 
tin, and countless others, including my own At- 
lanta : only, there, the policy of suppression of 
news and promulgation of falsehood is perhaps 
carried to a more nearly perfect extreme than in 
most other prisons. 

A few years ago, but under the present regime 
at Atlanta, the workers in the stone shed there 
were pursuing their occupation in the torrid heat 
of a summer day, when one of them, a young 
man named Ed Richmond, asked the guard on 
duty for leave to retire for a few moments. Such 



174 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

requests must of course often be made. But 
Richmond was a man who had not been lucky 
enough to win the favor of the higher officials in 
the prison, and this was known to the guards, who 
felt that they might with impunity treat him 
harshly. Richmond had been a good deal 
abused, and his mind had become somewhat un- 
balanced; he would sometimes talk incoherently 
and act oddly. It had been noticed that the stone 
shed guard " had it in for Ed," as the prisoners 
say ; but nothing very serious was looked for. 

Be that as it may, something serious was about 
to occur. Five or six years after this day, I was 
walking, under convoy of the Deputy Warden, in 
the prison grounds that lie outside the walls, when 
we stumbled upon the prison graveyard. It lay 
at the crest of some rising ground, partly over- 
shadowed by second growth timber, and was 
merely an unenclosed clearing in the rough under- 
growth with rows of headstones standing one be- 
hind the other, each with a name and date on it. 
But under all of them lay all that remained on 
earth of prison tragedies; for even if a prisoner 
die a natural death in prison, he dies with a broken 
heart and poisoned mind, abandoned, in gray de- 
spair, friendless, shut out from sky and freedom, 
hearing with dulled ears the clanging of steel gates, 
seeing the blank walls, deprived of the sympathetic 
words and glances of friends a miserable, un- 



Our Brother's Keeper 175 

known death. Silence and obliteration close over 
him; and here he lies. 

On one of the headstones I read the name of 
Ed Richmond, and the date of his end. He had 
not died a natural death, but there was nothing on 
his tombstone to show it. I already knew his 
story, having heard it from several eyewitnesses. 

On the day above mentioned, the guard had 
granted his request; but after the man had been 
absent a few minutes, he called to him to come out. 
Richmond did not at once respond. The guard 
called to him again, more peremptorily, and ad- 
vanced toward the place where he was, outside the 
stone shed building. Richmond, as the guard 
came nearer, mumbled something; the guard 
seemed angered, and stepped up to him, raising his 
club to strike. Richmond instinctively put up an 
arm to ward the blow, and as it descended he 
caught the end of the club in his hand. This was 
the head and front of his offending, and for this 
he was to die. 

The guard dropped the club, drew his revolver, 
and shot Richmond four times in the body. He 
also fired another shot, the bullet going through 
a wooden partition into a part of the shed where 
some prisoners were working, barely missing one 
of them. Richmond slowly dropped where he 
stood and lay huddled on the ground; the guard 
stood looking coolly at him. One of the prison- 



176 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

ers, a negro, ran up and took the dying man's 
head on his knee ; others looked on. After awhile 
an official came up and ordered the man taken to 
the hospital. But his hurts were mortal, and in a 
few minutes he was dead. The men in the stone 
shed continued their work. 

An investigation within the walls was held, the 
guard was exonerated, and was still on duty when 
I was in the prison. The officials who had dis- 
liked Richmond were relieved of the annoyance of 
his presence. There were no inconvenient news- 
paper reporters about. If the dead man had 
friends outside, they never were able to do any- 
thing. It seems unlikely that the guard who killed 
him would have done it had he not felt confident 
that the higher officials would condone the deed. 
Perhaps, had he been arrested and indicted, he 
might have uttered some names; but he was ex- 
onerated, and he has kept his mouth shut. This 
happened before the date of Attorney-General 
Wickersham's visit to the prison, and therefore 
before the change in Warden Moyer's ideas as to 
the expediency of severe measures in the handling 
of convicts. Were the thing to be done again 
to-day, it would probably not occur out in the open 
air and sunshine, with persons looking on, but 
under circumstances of decent seclusion. The 
outside public is becoming a little squeamish about 
prison killing. 

But in Russia there is no public opinion, or none 



Our Brother's Keeper 177 

that is audible, and the prison guards there are 
not hampered in their work by the necessity of 
doing it under cover, as they are here. It is a 
question which method is preferable. I believe 
some of our prisoners would vote for the open 
way of killing and torturing. It is exasperating 
to be " done up " in secret, in the dark, stifled 
and gagged, with no chance to die fighting. I 
have no comparative statistics as between us and 
Russia, but it would not be surprising if our record 
of men beaten, starved, poisoned, hung up in 
chains in dark cells, and killed by neglect and 
cruelties, were to size up fairly well against what 
Russia has to show. Considering the restrictions 
put upon them, our prison autocrats certainly do 
well. 

Some doubt has been created in the public mind 
as to whether there really are dark cells in the 
Atlanta Penitentiary, or, if there be, whether their 
use has not been long discontinued. I never 
heard any categorical statement in denial of it 
from any of the officials, though I have read some- 
thing to that effect in local newspapers. Visitors 
never see them, and I know of no prison inspect- 
ors who have done so ; they are shown instead the 
light cells on an upper floor, which are habitable 
enough, with windows admitting daylight, and a 
cot bed. But the dark cells are another story al- 
together, and their existence can no more be denied 
successfully than that of the prison itself. 



178 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

A man named H. B. Rich was employed in the 
prison for nine years as foreman of the black- 
smith's shop; he says that he helped build two 
dark cells in the basement, and often riveted chains 
on convicts there. " They were chained to the 
door," he goes on, " hanging by their hands, some- 
times for twenty-four hours. Often they were 
thus chained up during the day, but at night the 
chain attached to the frame of the door was loos- 
ened; the other chain was attached to a vertical 
rod, the ring sliding up and down, so that the 
man was able to lie on the bare cement floor. 
There were no cots. The food was generally 
one slice of bread and a cup of water a day, some- 
times two or three. Men were often kept thus for 
weeks at a time, and would come out so pallid and 
weak that they could scarcely walk, and blinded 
from long confinement in darkness. A convict 
named S. was kept in the dark hole two weeks ; I 
was often called to chain him, as he was a power- 
ful man ; but when he would come out, he was so 
weakened that he could scarcely move." 

I may add here that I have often talked with the 
convict here mentioned, and he told me details of 
his experiences. I would print his name and 
story, but he is still in confinement he has lived 
two and twenty continuous years in prison and 
he might be made to suffer for his revelations. 
Among other things, he said that he had been in 
the punishment cells, in the aggregate, eight 



Our Brother's Keeper 179 

years ! If he were not a lion of strength and cour- 
age, he would have been dead long since. The 
Atlanta penitentiary claims to be the most humane 
in the world. But eight years in chains and dark- 
ness seems a long time, even taken in instalments. 

A man lately released has this to say: " The 
administration of the penitentiary is a sham and 
pretense. l Reform ' is a show, for the benefit of 
government inspectors and visitors, with, under- 
neath, a callous and brutal disregard for the wel- 
fare of the convicts moral and physical. No tor- 
tures? I was trussed up, face to wall, with arms 
outstretched, for ten hours. When loosed, I just 
dropped to the floor from exhaustion, and did not 
rise till the next morning. That was during the 
present administration. When visitors and news- 
paper reporters go through the prison, * there isn't 
any hole ' ; but the prisoner who thoughtlessly in- 
fracts a rule knows that there is one I 

" In the Isolation Building there is a number of 
three-cornered cells where men are chained to the 
doors; they have little cots; these cells are shown. 
But down beneath there is the real hole. These 
underground cells have no cots; when a man drops, 
he drops on the cement floor. If they wish se- 
verely to discipline a man, they can make these 
cells practically airtight, and then turn on the steam 
through the pipes." 

Let us have more testimony as to the dark 
hole. " The hole," writes another inmate, " is 



180 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

not a hole in the wall or in the ground, but it is a 
place to turn a man's cheeks white and to make his 
knees shake and his lips tremble, when, for some 
infraction of very strict rules, he is ordered to the 
hole. It is a row of holes; far down in the bot- 
tom of the big bastile is a row of little cells, six 
feet wide, nine feet long, and perhaps ten feet 
high. Solid concrete, with iron grating in the 
narrow door. Absolutely dark. Furniture, one 
iron rod, one blanket. The man is handcuffed be- 
tween the rod and the wall, hands apart as far as 
he can hold them; at night the wall fastening is 
loosed, and he can lie down sliding the ring of his 
handcuff down the rod. No mattress or bed 
just floor. Food, three ounces of bread and a 
glass of water at noon. The rules are said to be 
less severe than formerly; but two half-breed In- 
dians, former friends, recognizing each other in 
Sunday school, ventured to whisper a greeting; 
they were put in the hole two days and nights, and 
one of them, a stout hardy boy, came out trem- 
bling and shaking as with mortal illness." 

A man who served as guard in the prison under 
the present warden, but left in 1907, affirms that 
barbarities were not the exception at that time, 
but the " horrible custom. The dark hole is a 
reality; men were kept there weeks at a time, to 
my certain knowledge, within stifling walls, chained 
standing for intolerable periods, with great suffer- 
ing. The public understands ' solitary confine- 



Our Brother's Keeper 181 

ment J to mean a cell by one's self; but this cell is 
a dark dungeon below earth level. One convict 
had to be brought out on a litter, his legs swollen 
to a frightful size; he could not stand erect. I 
was reprimanded for entering his cell and helping 
him to sit up. A man named L. who had drawn 
back his hammer threateningly when a guard 
advanced upon him armed with a ' square, 1 but 
who ceased to resist when the guard drew his re- 
volver, was sentenced to one hundred and forty- 
five days in the dungeon, with three slices of bread, 
with water, per day. Christian Endeavorers," 
this witness adds, " never have an opportunity to 
observe the real conditions. No outsider comes in 
contact with things as they are. No outsider in 
Atlanta has ever seen the dungeons." 

G. W., formerly employed in the prison, says 
that " the hole near the plumber's shop was built 
while Morse, the banker, was in the prison, for I 
helped build it, and the warden, with another 
official, was down to see it at ten in the morning." 
Speaking of the statement that the dark hole was 
no longer in use, he adds, in his letter to me, u You 
know of the hanging up in the dark cell of the old 
Englishman, in October " the month I left the 
penitentiary. I do know of it; the fight of this 
stubborn old fellow against the oppression of the 
prison authorities was the talk of the ranges just 
before my departure; he had done nothing worse 
than to use bad language; he would not give in; 



182 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

and I believe that it was found advisable at last 
to release him. 

The case of poor little B. had a less agreeable 
sequel. He was dying of diabetes during the lat- 
ter months of his confinement; he was an incor- 
rigible little thief, a man of extraordinarily acute 
mind, and a sort of saturnine humorist withal. 
He had been repeatedly convicted and imprisoned, 
but " I can't let it alone," he would say. He was 
plump and flabby, ghastly pale, with protruding 
eyes, very clear and penetrating. He was ridicu- 
lously impudent, but being so soon to die, as he 
himself well knew, none of the prisoners bore him 
a grudge. The authorities, however, thought it 
well to discipline him, and he was so repeatedly 
maltreated by them, and put in the dark hole, that 
his disease was greatly inflamed and the end has- 
tened. I said something designed to be encourag- 
ing to him shortly before I left; but he fixed me 
with those singular eyes, and said, " I am 
doomed! " 

The last I heard of B. was in a letter from a 
lady who has done much to help and relieve the 
sufferings and wrongs of prisoners in the jail. 
" B. is in a dying condition," she writes; " he was 
severely punished while suffering from his disease. 
W.," she goes on, " died three days after a ten- 
days' punishment. He had to be lifted from the 
dark cell and carried to the hospital by attend- 
ants." Upon the whole, one has grounds for be- 



Our Brother's Keeper 183 

lieving that the dark hole is not a fairy tale, and 
that it still exists and is at work in Atlanta Peni- 
tentiary, in spite of the impression to the contrary 
of the humane warden and his officials. 

The geography of the places is, however, ob- 
scure, and is known to the elect only; it is said 
by inmates of old standing that underground pas- 
sages connect the prison buildings and lead from 
one dungeon to another. This sounds romantic, 
but would be obviously useful in practise. A map 
of the premises, surface and subterranean, would 
be interesting, and may hereafter be achieved by 
some inspection which really inspects. I have not 
spoken of some features of the dark cells, as de- 
scribed by men who have experienced them, because 
they are so revolting that editors of newspapers 
would decline to print them. Human beings are 
compelled to endure many things which the fastid- 
iousness of other human beings cannot tolerate 
even the hearing of. 

A prisoner named Keegan was killed at Atlanta 
not long before I was released, not by a guard's 
bullet, but by means as sure though slower and 
more cruel. We were all conversant with his case 
at the time, but I will quote the man who knew him 
and his sufferings most intimately. Here is his 
crude narrative written to me on prison paper. 

4 William Keegan died in August of this year 
(1913) at the Pen. He was first taken sick with 
pains in the legs, hands and arms, and went to 



184 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

morning sick call, but could never get anything 
done, because he was a little deaf and could not 
hear what the doctor said, and so could explain no 
further, and he was in a very bad fix. They did 
nothing for him, and he was afraid to see the 
doctor, because he would have been impatient, and 
would have sent him to the hole, and then he 
would lose time. But he did go up to see him 
after the pains got into his back also, and he told 
him he would like to get out of the stone shed; 
and the doctor told him there was nothing the mat- 
ter with him, but he was only faking and trying 
to get out of work which I know and can swear 
to as being true. 

" If ever there was a sick man, Keegan was 
him. He told M. the foreman about it one day, 
who told him to have the doctor look him over, 
and sent him up one afternoon; the doctor looked 
him over and told him he was only a crank noth- 
ing at all the matter with him. Soon after he was 
taken very sick, and one night I called the prison 
nurse to his cell, and he had him taken to the hos- 
pital, where he stayed some time, but it did him no 
good, for he came back to the cell house in just as 
bad a fix as before. Then they put him to work 
in the paint-house, and after he had been there 
about a week, they said he was crazy, and put 
him in the hole. He was treated shamefully in the 
hole, for the prison nurse even told me so. Then 
he was taken again to the hospital, and he never 



Our Brother's Keeper 185 

came out of it, for he died there, and the prison 
nurse told me he suffered terribly before his death. 
This I will swear is true before God. 

' Very near every man in the Pen had a bad 
stomach, and could get nothing for it, for if you 
went to the doctor, he would tell you you ate too 
much, and give you a big dose of salts, and if you 
did not take them, he would put you in the hole, 
and then you would lose good time. But if a man 
had a pull, he would get along right enough. 
There was A., a bank wrecker, he was clerk in the 
stone shed, and I have seen him have eggs right 
in the kitchen, when we had only rice to eat with 
cold water and bread which was sour. If he 
didn't want to work he didn't have to, for when I 
worked as runner for the plumber I have seen A. 
lying down and smoking and reading or pretty 
near anything he wanted to do; but if other men 
had done less than half the things he did, they 
would have been put in the hole and lost good 
time also. Things should be looked into, for it 
is sure run shamefully." 

Readers would perhaps like to know more of 
the doctor, whose professional activities are so 
engagingly described in the above statement. He 
is a medical graduate of recent vintage, poor but 
aristocratic, engaged to attend four hours a day 
at the penitentiary at a salary of fifteen hundred 
dollars a year. " I need the money," he once ad- 
mitted to a colleague in the prison. Keegan, as 



i86 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

we have seen, was under his penetrating eye for 
months, and he died a few days after the young 
gentleman had assured him that there was nothing 
the matter with him. The doctor dresses well, 
and has an air; he has the use of an automobile, 
and sometimes escorts good looking young nurses, 
or other young ladies, about the prison grounds. 
He has a knack at surgical operations, and urges 
prisoners to be operated upon; they sometimes re- 
cover, and sometimes do not. His use of drugs in 
his practise seems to have been mainly restricted to 
prescribing salts, and the hole, both effective in 
their way, but not always happy in their applica- 
tion to the cases under consideration. 

He was always civil to me, and put me under 
the obligation of saving my life, for he ordered 
me a milk diet when I was succumbing to the in- 
fluences of prison hash and " hot dog." It was 
part of his duty to visit the dining room every day 
or was it every other day? and inspect the 
food served to the prisoners. During my six 
months' stay, he appeared twice in the doorway, 
where he exchanged amenities with the guard; and 
once he traversed the aisle between my row of 
tables and the next, accompanied by some very nice 
looking girls. He had other duties, which he dis- 
charged with similar punctuality and fervor. And 
all for fifteen hundred a year. 

There was a hearty, full-blooded, good natured 
young fellow, with red hair, who worked in the 



Our Brother's Keeper 187 

blacksmith's shop, and worked well. His over- 
seer was a negro this often happens in Atlanta 
Penitentiary. The heat in the forge room during 
summer was intense, and the red haired boy used 
to get rush of blood to the head, and finally asked 
a high official for leave to step out in the open air 
occasionally and cool off. It was granted. But 
on one of these outings his negro master ordered 
him to go back and do a job of work for him; the 
other quoted his official permission; there was a 
wrangle, ending in an appeal to a higher official 
still. The latter, in the face of the lower official's 
testimony that he had authorized the recess, sup- 
ported the negro, and the young blacksmith was 
sentenced to five days in the dark cell and thirty 
days' loss of good time. Discipline must be pre- 
served. 

Are such conditions as I have described general ? 
The newspapers during my stay at Atlanta de- 
scribed a discussion in local prison circles as to the 
propriety or expediency of whipping female pris- 
oners in the Georgia female prison (not connected 
with the federal penitentiary) , and confining then 
in the dark hole. The warden of the prison, a 
gentleman named Mitchell, and his guards, said 
that women did not mind confinement in the dark 
hole, and got no harm from it though it was 
shown that after being so confined for a day or 
two, they were scarce able to stand and wholly un- 
fit for work. The guards declared that the women 



l88 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

could not be effectively disciplined except by flog- 
ging, and threatened to quit in a body if the prac- 
tise were disallowed. Dr. MacDonald v of the 
prison, testified that although some wardens might 
abuse the power of flogging, and had lashed women 
on the bare back instead of over covering of one 
garment, as prescribed by the rules, still he favored 
whipping for them; he said the use of the 
" leather " was really more humane than the dun- 
geon. Secretary Yancey, of the Prison Commis- 
sion, also favored the lash. 

On the other hand, State Representative Black- 
burn said that it was " a dangerous policy to give 
such wide discretionary powers to wardens scat- 
tered about the state. It would give rise to ter- 
rible abuses and mistreatment. The sovereign 
power of the state should not be delegated to in- 
dividuals only remotely accountable. The puni- 
tive system should be carefully guarded, and the 
line of punishment mapped out, otherwise evils 
will creep in; no corrective measures that border 
upon crudity should be used." Representative 
Smith added that if we " put the power to use the 
whip on women in the hands of brutal and incompe- 
tent wardens, the same cruelties and atrocities 
which have shocked the civilized world will be re- 
peated. Wardens, drunk with power, abuse their 
positions; they are appointees of a system, inex- 
perienced and incompetent in many cases; chosen, 
not because of their fitness, but more likely to 



Our Brother's Keeper 189 

repay some political favor. When a good warden 
is found, it is more or less an accident. Give per- 
mission to whip, and the public would be horrified 
at the result, if ever they should learn the circum- 
stances." 

That is fine; but the concluding words mean 
more than they say. How is the public to know? 
If you had a mother or a sister or daughter in that 
jail, would you feel entirely reassured by the dec- 
lamations in the legislature of these kindly gentle- 
men? Would it not occur to you that, when this 
little flurry had blown over, the warden and his 
guards might possibly, and as quietly as might be, 
revert to what they held to be the only effective 
means of keeping order? It is easy, in a prison, 
to gag a woman so that she cannot scream, and to 
take her down to a secluded place, and there to lay 
on the leather heartily, with or without first re- 
moving the inner garment. Who is to know, or 
to tell? We are not Russians, to boast of these 
things openly. 

At the turpentine camp at Atmore, Alabama, 
thirty-five convicts whose contract had been an- 
nulled by Governor O'Neal, were brought to Mo- 
bile October roth, 1913, and placed in the county 
jail. All but fourteen had been whipped with 
heavy straps loaded with lead, and affidavits were 
offered showing that two of them had been whipped 
to death. But Superintendent of Prisons Riley of 
New York, in a letter to Warden Rattigan of Au- 



The Subterranean Brotherhood 

burn prison, writes: " I do not believe that any 
one was ever reformed by physical torture." This 
was not the view taken, apparently, in Jefferson 
City (Mo.) prison, for there, a few weeks ago, 
a negro was given a very hard task each day (says 
the Post-Dispatch of St. Louis), more than he 
could perform. At evening he would be taken out, 
strapped to a post and beaten with a heavy strap. 
There were cuts and sores all over his body. Fa- 
vored prisoners were allowed to break rules, while 
others were severely punished for the same thing. 
The penitentiary there is described as a " small 
hell entirely surrounded by masonry and incompe- 
tent officials." Dozens of men were brutally 
whipped for minor offenses. 

We have all heard about BlackwelPs Island, 
New York City, where " beatings by officials, and 
much worse, resulted in the death of a man." 
Trustee Hurd found two men in dark cells, one 
stupefied, the other hysterical and sobbing. They 
had been punished for whispering. The dark 
cells had been ordered discontinued some weeks 
before. Warden Hayes, on being asked by the 
official why he had permitted them to be used, re- 
plied, " Well, the fact is, I've been so busy I 
haven't had time to get round to it ! " What is 
his business? 

In Atlanta we do not use the leather; we find 
the club handier, and some guards are skilful in 
so applying it to the bodies of their patients that, 



Our Brother's Keeper 191 

while the external evidences are negligible, it oc- 
casions internal troubles which can be ascribed 
to " natural " causes. And there are indications 
that we do use the dark cell, described by Dr. Mac- 
Donald, above, as more inhumane than the lash. 
If this expert be correct, he gives us a standard 
whereby to measure how inhumane they must be. 
I cannot go on, though I have used only a frac- 
tion of my notebook. Moreover, I am inclined to 
think that the physical punishments I have in- 
stanced are not the worst that are administered in 
Atlanta and perhaps in other prisons. Great in- 
genuity is shown in the application of mental tor- 
tures, which have their outcome in insanity, but 
which never can be investigated by commissions 
and inspectors. An insane man is as safe as a 
dead man if he tells tales, no one will pay at- 
tention to him. The cat-and-mouse game is a 
favorite with the inhumane type of wardens. Give 
your man alternations of hope and despair, and 
the results will soon reward your pains. Then 
there are the insults, the gibes and threats, the 
obscure forms of tyranny and outrage, the degra- 
dation of manhood there are a hundred subtle 
ways of destroying and corrupting the spirit of a 
man. To be compelled to occupy the same cell 
with certain types of criminals is a most successful 
form of inhumanity; and when, as often happens, 
one of the two is a comparatively innocent boy, the 
results are awful. " Insufficient number of cells " 



192 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

is the explanation given; and at Atlanta at least 
there are the unfinished cell houses, which might 
have been finished years ago, had the appropria- 
tions been properly applied. 

" Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner ! " we pray 
in our churches. But He says, " With what meas- 
ure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you again." 
We do not set the Lord a good example of mercy 
in our prisons. 



XI 
THE GRASP OF THE TENTACLES 

I HAVE spoken of punishments inside the 
prison. When a man has served his time 
and is set free (as it is called) another punishment 
begins, which may be worse and more dishearten- 
ing than the suffering endured inside the walls. 

As I listened, on Saturday afternoons, or at 
other times, to the stories hurriedly and guardedly 
told me by my fellow convicts who had served 
more terms than one, I said to myself, " The 
wrong of prison is bad enough; but this of what 
happens to a man after prison is worse, and mon- 
strous." The endless tentacles follow him, reach 
out after him, surround him, fasten upon him, and 
draw him back whence he came. And not that 
only, but they mark him and isolate him, disable 
him from free action, make honesty impossible 
for him. No citizen of whatever integrity and 
standing, if so pursued, maligned and undermined, 
would have any choice left him but either to perish 
or to break the laws. The spies of the govern- 
ment, with the prestige and power of the govern- 
ment behind them (however despicable and vicious 

193 



194 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

they may be in themselves), can ruin any man; 
but ex-convicts are their staple food. 

In the latter part of June, 1913, a federal 
judge named Emory Speer was accused of evil 
deeds on the bench, and a congressional investiga- 
tion was announced. The judge was taken ill, and 
at this writing the investigation still hangs fire. 
Now, the evidence against him had been collected, 
it would appear, by the agency of government 
spies, and this fact caused great indignation in 
some quarters. Here was a man not convicted of 
felony, but a pillar of the state, being pursued by 
detectives just as if for all the world he were an 
ordinary person an obscure private citizen, say, 
or an ex-convict ! The judge himself was very in- 
dignant, and his friends on the local press were 
rasping in their comments. In a long editorial 
entitled " The Shadow of the Spy," one Atlanta 
paper denounced the proceedings root and branch. 
It affirmed that the governmental spy system had 
assumed such proportions during the past few 
years as to threaten one of the mainstays of free 
government. 

All this interested my comrades, not because the 
spy system was news to them, but because no public 
notice had been taken of it until it began to wring 
the withers of persons who had hitherto supposed 
themselves to be in the position of promoters in- 
stead of victims of the practise. A federal judge 
had never protested against pursuing with spies 



The Grasp of the Tentacles 195 

men suspected of crimes, or men who, having 
served time upon conviction, had then gone out 
into the world and attempted to lead a new life. 
The spy system, so conducted, seemed to such per- 
sons proper and normal. But the moment they 
found their own acts investigated, their own foot- 
steps dogged, they became indignant, and de- 
nounced the whole principle of the thing. 

No man convicted in a federal or state court, or 
set free after having done his time in prison, but 
is abundantly conversant with the methods of the 
American spy. 

As we all know, the first thing done with a new 
prisoner is to take his bertillons, and the record 
of these measurements and observations, together 
with two photographs of him, or with four, if he 
had a beard when convicted, is sent to every police 
office in the country, and is there studied by the de- 
tectives and police. The intention, of course, is to 
render easier the recognition of " old offenders," 
and to curtail their future industries. It is gen- 
erally affirmed that bertillons cannot be mistaken; 
but in a Detroit cou/t, on January loth, 1914, an 
expert declared that " a difference of one-eighth of 
an inch in the laying on of the fingers made an 
entirely different impression"; and "judgment 
was awarded against the bank," which, relying 
upon the infallibility of the finger record, had 
brought the action. At any rate, the bertillon is 
still a potent weapon with the police, and when 



196 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

they want a man for a crime committed, or when 
they desire to drive out of any given place on the 
face of the earth a man who has been previously 
a convict, they have but to point to his bertillons, 
and the thing is done. 

Let us see how this may work out in practise. 
A convict, having served his term, is presented by 
the United States (or a state, as the case may be) 
with a suit of new clothes, and with a five dollar 
bill. He also gets a ticket on the railway to the 
place of his destination, and, though he is in theory 
a free man from the moment that he passes the 
prison gates, as a matter of fact an official is as- 
signed to take charge of him and put him on his 
train; he cannot remain in Atlanta (supposing for 
the once that Atlanta Penitentiary has been his 
abiding place during his sentence) on penalty, if 
he do, of forfeiting his ticket and having to pay 
his own way. This may be a provision of the law, 
or it may be simply a measure to prevent ex-con- 
victs from talking to newspaper reporters or other 
enquiring persons. The thing is invariably done, 
unless the man's residence happens to be Atlanta 
itself. 

In my own case (to cite an instance) the regular 
procedure was observed, with only one accidental 
modification. I received my suit of clothes, my 
five dollars, and my railway ticket at least, the 
latter was given to the guard detailed to accom- 
pany me to the station, to be by him delivered to 



The Grasp of the Tentacles 197 

the conductor of my train. But I had previously 
made up my mind to say a few things to the re- 
porter of a certain local newspaper, and I was 
ready, in case of necessity, to abandon my elee- 
mosynary ticket and to pay my own way to New 
York on a later train. I had money of my own to 
do this with; most ex-prisoners, of course, have 
not. But the sacrifice was avoided by the circum- 
stance that Mr. Moyer, the warden, was absent 
at the moment in Indianapolis, and the deputy 
incautiously let me out an hour or more before my 
train started. I lost no time in meeting my re- 
porter, and during the next forty minutes, in an au- 
tomobile provided for the occasion, we drove about 
the streets of Atlanta, while I imparted to his as- 
tonished ears my reasons for thinking that the 
penitentiary was not the paradise on earth that it 
had hitherto betn believed to be. He brought me 
to the railway station in season for my train, and I 
got safely away, leaving mischief behind me. 

That was my good luck. On the other hand, a 
friend of mine recently released told me that the 
warden had called him into his office at the last 
moment, and had extracted from him a promise not 
to talk to any reporter in the town before leaving. 
That is the usual way; but it is the exception, 
sometimes, that counts. 

Let us return to our average convict, just out, 
and with the world before him, where to choose 
to display his prison-made garments and to spend 



198 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

his five dollars. It not seldom happens, to begin 
with, that he is not so much out as he had im- 
agined. Our present method with convicts has 
peculiarities. Here is a common example. 

A man was convicted and jailed for robbing 
a postoffice. The sentence was five years. The 
specific charge was of stealing postage stamps. 
Having done his bit in the federal penitentiary, he 
was given his outfit and the gates were opened. 
He was proceeding joyfully on his way, when a 
sheriff laid a hand on his shoulder, and informed 
him that he was his prisoner. What for? The 
sheriff smilingly explained that the sentence he had 
just served was for a federal offense; he was 
wanted now on a state charge of breaking into the 
grocery store in which the postoffice was housed. 
For this, the state prison accommodated him with 
lodging for five years more. The man outlived 
that, and fatuously imagined that his payment of 
that debt was fully discharged. He was awakened 
by the hand on his shoulder again. What was the 
matter now? Why, he had, while in the grocery 
store, and in addition to stealing the federal post- 
age stamps, possessed himself unlawfully of a box 
of matches, thereby committing a second state 
crime, involving a further detention in the state 
prison of five years more. 

This is an example of our cat-and-mouse way 
with convicts, and is, of course, much more de- 
structive to the victim than an outright sentence of 



The Grasp of the Tentacles 199 

the same length would have been. But in what 
manner it tends to reform a man, or to protect a 
community, does not clearly appear. 

Sometimes, the sheriff is dilatory in arriving to 
make the second or third arrest, and it would 
seem that the prisoner might have a chance to 
escape. But in such a case the warden himself 
would take a hand in the game. In an instance of 
which I heard a good deal, the man's sentence ex- 
pired, we will say, on June ist. The warden had 
been apprised that he was to be re-arrested, but 
the sheriff was not on hand could not get there 
for two days. But the law, or prison regulations, 
or something, enables a warden to detain a pris- 
oner beyond his fixed time, in the event of his com- 
mitting some prison irregularity. The warden in- 
formed the man that he was reported to have 
broken a plate in the dining room, the penalty for 
which was three days more in his cell. Before the 
three days were up, the sheriff had arrived, the 
man was re-arrested, and justice was satisfied. 

We will suppose, however, that our man has no 
second or third or other indictments hanging over 
him, and that he really does get clean away. What 
will be his adventures*? 

If the weather be not rainy he reaches his train 
unscathed. But if that new suit, with " jail-bird " 
written all over it in characters which all detectives 
and police, at least, can read as they run, chance 
to get wet, the raw shoddy forthwith shrivels mis- 



2OO The Subterranean Brotherhood 

erably up, and the wearer's ankles and wrists stick 
out so betrayingly that a mere child might recog- 
nize the sinister source of the garments. JBut, any- 
how, a few days' wear will so wrinkle and crease 
and deform the suit that it becomes unwearable, 
and the man might as conveniently and more pru- 
dently go about in shirt and drawers. Should he 
present himself in it requesting a job from some 
virtuous citizen, the latter is less likely to grant 
it than to step to the 'phone and call up the police 
station. '* There's a suspicious character here 
better look him over!" The officer looks him 
over accordingly, and either advises him to betake 
himself promptly elsewhere, or, if a crime happen 
to have been committed recently in that neighbor- 
hood, the perpetrators of which are still at large, 
he takes the man into custody on suspicion. 

That the man is utterly innocent makes small 
difference; his status as an old offender is readily 
established, and the rest follows almost automatic- 
ally. ' You did the job all right; but, if you 
didn't, you're a vagrant, without visible means of 
support, and they'll put you in the lockup for six 
months or a year. And let me tell you, our lockup 
is no joke ! Likely you'll get on the chain gang, 
and then, God help you ! If they don't take a 
fancy to you, they're liable to croak you any time. 
Now, I'd like to see you get out of this easy, and 
here's what you'd better do. You own up to the 
crime, and I'll have a word with the judge, so he'll 



The Grasp of the Tentacles 201 

let you off with a short sentence in a place where 
they treat men right, and you'll get out in about 
three or four months. That's what you'd best do ; 
and if you don't, I wash my hands of you ! What 
do you say? " 

What would you do? Stand on your rights, 
demand a full and fair trial, prove your innocence, 
and be acquitted without a stain on your character? 
That is the proper and righteous course for a free 
and independent American citizen. 

But you are not a citizen, in the first place; 
your civic rights are gone for good, and instead 
of your innocence beinjg assumed till your guilt is 
proved, it is the other way about. Your friend 
the detective is prepared, for one, to swear that 
to the " best of his knowledge and belief," you are 
the culprit; and there is commonly a number of 
other easy swearers hanging about the court room 
to support him. You have no friends ; on the con- 
trary, every eye you meet is hostile. You have no 
money to hire a lawyer, for that five dollars had 
gone before you had mustered courage to ask for 
the job that got you into this trouble. And above 
all, your spirit is cowed and prostrate from years 
in prison; you have known the long, sterile bitter- 
ness of penal servitude, and you have no stomach 
fon a fight. No, you will not fight you cannot. 
You will stand up in the dock and confess to some- 
thing you never did, and throw yourself on the 
mercy of the court. Your friend the detective 



2O2 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

whispers to the judge " He's an incorrigible 
he ought to get the limit!" And His Honor 
gives you ten years. It is less than a week since 
you put off stripes, and went out into the world 
resolved to make good. If you outlive your un- 
deserved sentence, will you ever resolve to make 
good again? 

Can such things be ? Indeed they can, and they 
are. There is poor C. in Atlanta now, the victim 
of such a deal; and S., and H., and many more. 
C., indeed, told me, and I believe him, that he 
never committed any crime at all, other than to get 
drunk and to sleep out on the road; he was appre- 
hended for vagrancy, then charged with a post- 
office robbery in another state (which he had never 
visited), advised by the detective who "took an 
interest " in him to confess, upon the promise of 
being let off with a light sentence ; he got the limit, 
and will wear out his youth in jail, while the de- 
tective is complimented for his efficiency. 

The Government is extravagant. What is the 
use of spending money on a shoddy suit of clothes 
for each one of thousands of convicts every year, 
and giving each of them a five dollar bill, with the 
certainty that, in a large majority of cases, they 
will be back in their cells in a few days or weeks, 
or months ? Look up, if you please, the statistics 
as to the number of convicts who are second or 
third offenders. Nay, the Government is itself 
the prime and most effective cause of their getting 



The Grasp of the Tentacles 203 

back, since it is government spies that provide the 
evidence that sends them up. 

But can we afford to trust ex-convicts? Must 
we not keep a strict eye on them? If the strict 
eye were also a friendly one, it might be of some 
avail. But our hand is against them, and we 
need not wonder that theirs is against us. Not 
only are we their enemies when they emerge from 
jail, but (as has been repeated interminably by 
every investigator who has been qualified to speak 
on the subject) jails are the best and only schools 
of crime. In other words, we first educate men to 
be criminals by putting them in places where they 
can learn nothing else, and then we keep them 
criminals by shutting against them, when freed, 
every opportunity to earn food and lodging in 
legitimate ways. And then we complain that they 
are not to be trusted. 

Neither can men fed on poisons be trusted to be 
well. Jail life is poisonous ; I think it was Judge 
McLeland who said, last summer, " Our million 
dollar reformatories offer university courses in 
bestiality and crime; it is as logical to send a man 
to jail to make him better as to shut him up in a 
garbage-can to improve his digestion. Forty per 
cent, of those who go to jail, go back again," he 
added; "one man went back one hundred and 
seventy-six times. Others are sent because they 
are poor and cannot pay a fine, and they are there 
made real criminals." 



204 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

An instance of this occurred in a Georgia chain- 
gang while I was in Atlanta. A man was sen- 
tenced for playing cards for money. He could 
not pay the $45 fine demanded, and in default, 
was sent to the chain-gang for eight months. He 
wore stripes, night and day, and if contumacious, 
was whipped by the guards. His work was in a 
stone quarry, a deep hole, into which the summer 
sun poured an insufferable heat. He was forced 
to do his work with a 49-pound hammer in that 
funnel-shaped pit, at a hundred degrees in the 
shade if he could find any shade. One day he 
told the guard he was sick, and could not work any 
longer. The guard shifted the quid in his mouth 
and remarked that he ought to have said so that 
morning. But the man meant what he said, and 
proved it by dying a day or two later. Probably 
you may have played cards for money at some time 
in your life. Did it ever occur to you that you 
merited torture and death for it? 

Or do you think that, after such an experience 
(if you survived it), or after being twice arrested 
for the same crime and kept in jail five years three 
times over, or after doing time for a crime you 
never committed that you would come out at 
the end of it all, smiling, full of energy and enter- 
prise, loving your neighbor, eager for honest toil? 
Would you embrace Mr. Moyer (or whomever 
your jailer was) and tell him, with tears of grati- 
tude, that you could never repay him for his warm- 



The Grasp of the Tentacles 205 

hearted, big-brained care of you the starving, 
the dungeoning, the clubbing, and all the rest of 
the university course ? 

Would you feel like that? Or would you stare 
out upon the world into which you were contemptu- 
ously tossed with dull, hating, revengeful eyes, 
suspicious of all men, hopeless of good, but re- 
solved to get even, so far as you might, by plying 
the evil trades which your life of slavery had 
taught you ? Would you behave like Christ upon 
the Cross, or like an ordinary man? Convicts are 
ordinary men, except that they are often, to begin 
with, diseased men, or hemmed in by conditions 
so untoward as to make an honest life ten or a 
hundred times harder than it ever was for you. 

But you did not scruple to put this diseased or 
unfortunate version of yourself into the jail 
cauldron, to stew there with others like or worse 
than himself, for doing what, in most cases, he ac- 
tually could not help doing; and when at last he 
was ejected like stale refuse, you were indignant 
because his looks did not please you, because he 
bore upon him the stains and the stench which the 
cauldron had fastened on him, because he did not, 
in the teeth of the secret service, the postoffice in- 
spectors, the detective bureaus and the police, at 
once begin to lead an honest life and support the 
commonwealth. Do you say that none of this 
was your doing? But it is your doing, in just so 
far as you have not striven in every way open to 

\ 



206 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

you to extirpate the doing of it by this representa- 
tive government. 

The wonderful thing the unexpected and 
pathetic thing is, that so many convicts come 
out of jail in a kindly and inoffensive state of mind. 
They are men who were born weak, humble and 
yielding, never esteemed themselves, were always 
ready to take a back seat and give precedence to 
others. They do not understand the rights of the 
matter, but suppose it must be all right, that penal 
servitude is the proper thing for them, that laws 
were made by wise men and must be enforced. 
They admit their stealings and their trickery, and 
blame themselves, observing regretfully that they 
didn't seem able to help it. Next time if they 
get a next time they will try very hard to be 
straight, and perhaps they will succeed after all! 

There was little J., in the barbers' gang, a 
cheerful, smiling, sweet tempered fellow, who had 
served I know not how many terms for small 
larcenies and turpitudes. " I've always been such 
a damned little fool," he would say to me, as he 
smoothed off my chin. '' The boys would get 
round me and rope me into some scheme, and I 
didn't seem able to keep clear of 'em. But I'm 
goin' to be let out again next July, and I've made 
up my mind I'll never be seen here again! No, 
sir ! Oh, I've been talkin' with the chaplain, too, 
and I've been reading the Bible, and all that, and 



The Grasp of the Tentacles 207 

I'm going to be a good man. Yes, sir ! I've had 
my fling, and I'm through with it; when the boys 
get round me and tell me of some easy job, I'll tell 
'em, No! Not for J." 

He was a man of forty, as nai've and " in- 
nocent " (in the unmoral sense) as a child; and he 
had been in jail off and on since he was ten years 
old. I happened to be in the front office at the 
moment when J. was signing receipts and receiv- 
ing his property preparatory to leaving. He was 
dressed in a neat business suit of his own not 
a prison-made monstrosity. He was clean and 
smooth and bright, and tremulous with excitement. 
He signed his papers with a shaking hand, he took 
up and put down again his well packed gripsack, 
he shook hands with a sort of clinging, appealing 
grasp, as if he were afraid of being left alone, he 
giggled and looked profoundly solemn by turns. 
The officials stood about, indifferent and con- 
temptuous, the men who had been hard and cruel 
to him, and those who had not been so hard. 

It was a bright, beautiful day, full of sunshine; 
J. picked up his grip and marched down the cor- 
ridor and out into the free air. He wore a brave 
air of hope and determination, but one could de- 
tect underneath it symptoms of misgiving. He 
had vowed to be good, but could he keep the vow, 
when " the boys got round him " ? I wished him 
good luck with all my heart. Six months have 



208 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

passed, and J. is not back in jail yet, so far as I have 
heard. But the spies are watching him, and he 
won't be safe till he is dead. 

A man with whom chance brought me frequently 
in contact was H., a yegg, as the term is. 

When a guard is escorting a batch of visitors 
about the prison, he speaks of the yeggs in an 
ominous tone, as if they were some deadly mon- 
ster, hardly to be even looked at with impunity. 
But yeggs, as a body, are the best men in the 
prison; they have a code of honor, and strength 
of character. Outside, they blow open safes, and 
do other risky jobs; and they will shoot to kill 
on the occasions when it is their life or the other 
man's. They will do this, because they know 
what a prison is, and also what spies outside prison 
are. But they will spare your life, if possible ; not 
because they care for you they hate and de- 
spise you, as being a man who would be and have 
in the past been merciless to them, and as a 
hypocrite who is either a rascal on the sly or would 
be if you possessed the courage or were subjected 
to the temptation they spare you not from 
mercy but a settled policy; killing is bad business, 
and means sooner or later a violent end for the 
killer. 

Most yeggs are men of more than average in- 
telligence, and sometimes of fair education; they 
were not born outlaws; but, if you can win them 
to speak of themselves, you will generally find that 



The Grasp of the Tentacles 209 

they have undergone things both in and out of 
prison enough to make an outlaw out of a saint. 
Most men succumb under such things, and either 
die, or become cowed in spirit ; the yeggs have sur- 
vived, and their spirit is unbroken. They hold 
the highest place in the estimation of their fellow 
prisoners; and the warden and the guards fear 
them. By that I mean that they fear to inflict 
severities upon them except upon some pretext at 
least plausible ; for the yeggs know the rules, and 
though they will submit without a whimper to the 
cruelest punishments if cause can be alleged for it, 
yet wanton liberties, such as prisoners less well 
informed or more pusillanimous submit to, cannot 
safely be taken with them. 

The yeggs stand together; they have esprit de 
corps, and if, as happened last summer at Atlanta, 
the food supply drops actually to the starvation 
point in both quantity and quality, they stand for- 
ward as they did then as champions for the 
rest of the men; they protest openly, they will not 
be wheedled or terrorized, and they go to the hole 
as one man. Nor will they come out thence until 
the warden comes to them and promises improve- 
ment. The warden promises, not because he de- 
sires improvements, but because he fears the scan- 
dal of mutiny in the prison an inconvenient 
thing when one is supposed to be conducting a 
model institution; and even an easy going public, 
which will tolerate other forms of cruelty to con- 



21O The Subterranean Brotherhood 

victs, feels compunction about starving them, espe- 
cially when it is taxed to provide them with whole- 
some and sufficient food. 

About my friend H. I have no space here to 
tell his story, nor to outline it even ; it is a terrible 
one. I may be able, some time, in another place, 
to present it in full. I will say now only that he 
was once confined for three years in a contract 
labor jail which has the worst features conceivable 
in any prison of to-day or of a hundred years ago, 
and men are killed there by overwork and punish- 
ments as a matter of routine; few survive the 
treatment so long as H. did. Once during his 
three years he uttered three words aloud; for 
that he was punished so long and so savagely that 
the horror of it yet remains with him. Prisoners 
constantly maim their hands voluntarily in the ma- 
chinery in order to be quit of the torture of the 
work; the bleeding stumps of their fingers or hands 
are roughly bound up, and they are driven back 
to their machines. The warden is an oily, com- 
fortable rogue, who beams upon visitors and fools 
the prison commission to the top of its bent, and 
he bears an excellent reputation for the large 
amount of work he gets out of his prisoners; 
* They just love it, my boys do," he avers; " noth- 
ing like work to keep men happy, you know." 
And then, when the coast is clear, he turns upon his 
boys like a bloodthirsty tiger. 



The Grasp of the Tentacles 211 

But what I wish to say here is, that when H. 
at last finished his term and was thrust forth into 
the crowded street of the city, his legs failed him, 
and he tottered along scared like a wild beast at 
the noise and bustle. A man addressed him, and 
he stared at him blankly, and could not command 
his tongue to speak words. He wandered on ir- 
regularly, starting at imaginary dangers, unnerved 
at the height of the sky, the noise, the movement. 
He sought the least frequented streets, but his 
aspect and bearing made people look suspiciously 
at him, and he found his way to the slums, where 
he got a room and shut himself in with a feeling of 
relief. It was several days before he could school 
himself to talk and act like an ordinary human 
being. His health was shattered, though he was 
naturally a strong and hearty man; eating made 
him sick, though he was faint for lack of right 
feeding. 

He could find no steady employment, but helped 
himself along with odd jobs here and there. He 
was resolute to keep straight, but an old pal of his 
happened to meet him, did him some good turns, 
and finally proposed his joining two or three men 
in a promising burglary. H. asked time to think 
it over, and that night he left the city in a sort 
of panic, and traveled to a large town a hundred 
miles away. Here he succeeded in getting a good 
job; his spirits began to revive; he made some 



212 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

good acquaintances, and prospered beyond all ex- 
pectation for nearly a year. One day he noticed 
a man in the street who stared hard at -him; not 
long after he saw the same man standing in front 
of the house in which he lodged; the next morning 
his landlord came to him and, with some embar- 
rassment, said that he would have to ask him 
for his room ; a relative was about to visit him and 
he needed the accommodation. 

It was as he had feared the detectives had run 
him down. He put what he possessed in a trunk 
and left town that evening for a place nearly a 
thousand miles west. Here he was left undis- 
turbed for fifteen months, and made a new start 
in business. Then the chief of the local police 
sent for him and said, " I don't want to be rough 
on you ; but the best thing you can do is to skip ; 
we're on to you- understand?" " But I'm 
doing a straight business," H. pleaded. " You 
may be; but you're a crook," was the reply. 

We need not follow him further; he was driven 
from one place to another. At last he was caught 
with stolen goods on him, he having undertaken to 
help an old friend of his out of a tight place by 
carrying his gripsack from one place to another; 
it proved to contain some plunder from a recent 
burglary. He got off with a two year sentence; 
but it was the end of his attempt to reform. 
" Crooked or straight, I'll end in jail," he said 
to me, with that strange convict smile which means 



The Grasp of the Tentacles 213 

such unspeakable things. " I've got two years 
more here; if I last it out, they'll get me again." 

I firmly believe that he would have been an 
honest and successful man if he had been let alone. 

It sometimes happens that the manhood of a 
convict is so sapped by long sufferings that even 
his desire for freedom is lost. He is afraid to be 
free; he cannot live at ease outside of his cell 
walls. Perhaps you will say that goes to prove 
the gentleness and humanity of prison discipline. 
To me it seems a thing so appalling that I must be 
content with the bare statement of the fact. A 
man is afraid to be free, afraid of the great won- 
derful world, and of his fellow creatures, and can 
endure what he supposes to be life only in his steel 
cell. What has put that fear in him? But our 
laws provide no penalty for dehumanizing a fellow 
creature under the forms of law. If it be legal, 
it must be right. 

I knew a man in our prison who had been thirty- 
five years in confinement, with short intervals of 
liberty. The best favor he could ask was to be 
allowed to stay all day and all night in his cell, 
doing nothing. Year after year, nothing else than 
this appeared to him worth while. He was well 
educated, as prisoners go, quiet and inoffensive. 
" I wish some doctor would examine me and tell 
me what is the matter with me," he remarked to 
me once. " Maybe I'm crazy! " 

After all, the world, in its way, is as hard a 



214 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

place for ex-convicts as a jail; more cruel, perhaps, 
inasmuch as it seems to offer hopes that jails deny. 
But can a world be called civilized that is satisfied 
with that arraignment? 



XII 
THE PRISON SILENCE 

HOW many convicts, during the past twenty 
years, have served their terms and been 
released? and yet what does the public know of 
the real inside of prisons? This used to perplex 
me at first. My fellow prisoners with whom I 
talked were bitter and voluble enough in de- 
nouncing the conditions; but no sooner had they 
passed the gates to freedom than they became 
strangely silent. Some of them even were quoted 
in the local papers as praising and upholding what 
they had just before condemned. 

There was a Japanese prisoner, for example, 
the only man of his nation there, I think, who 
gained attention by copies of well-known pictures 
which he made, to be hung on the walls of the 
chapel, and by designing back and side scenes for 
the stage. I never talked personally with him, or 
saw him but at a distance, as he hastened along 
the corridor ; but men who knew him said that he 
was especially savage in his diatribes against the 
prison and its keepers, and had promised, as soon 
as he was freed, to make numerous ugly disclosures 
to the world. But when we searched the local pa- 

215 



216 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

pers after his release, what we found was a hearty 
and explicit laudation of the prison and its officials. 
Had it been written by the warden himself, it 
could not have been more sunny and satisfied. 

Again, there was a man with us who had been 
sentenced for life on a murder charge of a singu- 
larly revolting kind; he had been in confinement 
seventeen years when I first knew him, but had 
always consistently protested his innocence. He 
applied for parole, and his application was 
granted. At this time he occupied a large cell con- 
taining eleven other prisoners, of whom I was one ; 
and he attached himself very closely to me, and 
upon coming in from his work each evening, would 
sit beside my cot and hold my hand and pour out 
his heart to me in lamentations, asseverations of 
his innocence, picturings of the horrors of his long 
confinement, forecastings of what he meant to do 
when he was freed to address audiences from 
the pulpit and rostrum, and convince the world 
of the horrors of penal imprisonment. He was 
deeply religious, and had the moral courage to 
kneel down, before all the men in the cell, and 
spend five minutes or more in prayer every even- 
ing before going to bed. Every one believed that 
he had been wrongly convicted, if for no better rea- 
son, because he had never once wavered from his 
claim of innocence during those seventeen years, 
and because his conduct and bearing in the prison 
had always been exemplary. He was a man of 



The Prison Silence 217 

powerful body and strong, impressive mind; his 
speech was simple and convincing, and I told him 
that I thought he would succeed as an avatar of 
prison iniquities. He professed an ardent affec- 
tion for me, and expressed enthusiastic anticipa- 
tions as to the outcome of my own projects for 
calling public attention to the evils in question. 

This man was tortured for five or six weeks 
by unexplained delay in fulfilling the promise of 
his parole, during which time it fell to my daily 
lot to comfort and encourage him; and I suffered 
no little emotional stress myself from this constant 
drain on my sympathies. Every evening, sitting 
beside my cot, he would repeat over and over 
again the same lamentations and speculations, in- 
terjecting at the end of each apostrophe, " It's 
terrible terrible!" until at last I felt that I 
would gladly give up my own " good time " for 
the sake of seeing him freed without further pro- 
crastination. I was convinced, and so told him, 
that the delay could be due to nothing but neglect, 
inadvertent or criminal, on the part of LaDow, 
the President of the Parole Board, or of the At- 
torney-General himself; the papers had been thrust 
into a pigeonhole, and been forgotten or ignored. 

What were the tortures of a man imprisoned for 
seventeen years, and now standing on the brink of 
salvation or despair, to a supercilious official up 
.in Washington? 

"Finally, without explanation or apology, the 



218 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

order for release came; and for me and his other 
friends, as well as for him, it was a day of re- 
joicing and thanksgiving. But, remembering that 
he was on parole, and therefore liable, on the least 
infringement of discipline, to be thrust back in his 
cell, none of us expected that he would venture to 
denounce the wrongs and expose the miseries of 
the imprisoned ; we were glad to learn that he had 
secured a position paying him twenty or thirty 
dollars a month, with a chance of better things 
later, and that he had announced his purpose of 
running down the real perpetrator of the crime for 
which he had suffered, and forcing him to confess. 
For a few days, one or two local papers gave him 
half a column, and then there was silence. 

I had been denied parole, and the restrictions 
thereof did not apply to me when my own day 
of freedom arrived; and I gave a short interview 
to a reporter, in which I said that the warden was 
unfit for his position, that the food was abomina- 
ble, and that punishment in dark cells and other- 
wise was still practised, though under cover. 

The next day the newspapers printed an inter- 
view with my late friend, in which he was quoted 
as declaring that every statement I had made was 
a malicious lie, that the warden was in all respects 
the best, kindest and most lovable man he had 
ever met, and that the men in confinement had all 
the food they asked for, of the best quality, and 



The Prison Silence 219 

that all tales of hardships and cruel punishments 
were false and wicked. 

Is it conceivable that these statements were 
really given out by him? It seemed more likely 
that the words had been put into his mouth, under 
a threat, should he disavow them, of being sent 
back to prison. From such a threat the bravest 
man might shrink. But that statement of his still 
stands unmodified. And whether made spon- 
taneously, or under the compulsion of a threat, its 
motive seems to have been fear of punishment 
for telling the truth. Such is the power of the 
System over its victims ! 

It is a state of things nothing less than nauseat- 
ing. It is bad enough that men should be held in 
prison and maltreated; but that the truth should 
be imprisoned with them, gagged and terrified into 
silence, is a grave matter indeed. New York is 
complaining just now of the strength in corruption 
of its police system; but it seems almost trivial 
compared with this, for while the police ring profits 
by cooperating with the criminals they are paid 
to suppress, the prison ring profits by maiming or 
destroying human lives entrusted to their care tc 
be restrained for a season from their own evil im- 
pulses, and thus if possible reformed; and, when 
they are released, it guards itself against exposure 
by the menace of revenge more formidable still. 
The parole and the indeterminate sentence, framed 



22O The Subterranean Brotherhood 

to open the way to reform of prisoners, is used by 
prison officials to intimidate and debase them ; and 
if any ex-convict ventures to defy this fortified 
despotism, the immediate rejoinder is, " Who can 
believe a jail-bird? A man wicked enough to 
steal or murder is wicked enough to lie, and is not 
the malicious motive of the lie apparent? " 

That rejoinder has been brought, and will con- 
tinue to be brought against me. Among those 
who protested against the statements in my inter- 
view above mentioned was a lady whom I never 
spoke to it is strictly against rules for a prisoner 
to speak with a visitor and never knowingly 
saw, though I understand she was wont to sit on 
the stage during the Sunday exercises. She is 
thus quoted: "Julian Hawthorne is nothing 
more than an old grouch. A short time ago this 
old man told me himself that he was getting plenty 
to eat and had no complaint to make of his own or 
inybody else's treatment in the prison. . . . When 
he says such things as he is reported to have said, 
he should be made to prove them, or keep his 
mouth shut." Warden Moyer himself, less im- 
aginative than this lady, contented himself with 
denying all charges and courting investigation, and 
added that he bore me no grudge, believed me to 
have been the dupe of malignant guards (since 
dismissed) and considers my motive to have been 
mainly the desire to make a little money. ' The 
Department attaches little importance to these out- 



The Prison Silence 221 

breaks," he remarked, " and I consider it unneces- 
sary to place my word against that of convicts." 

This may seem feeble ; it is the mere instinctive 
stuttering of persons in a disturbed frame of mind. 
But the System will not depend for its defense 
upon persons of this kind. It has many strong 
forces at its command, of which the Secret Service, 
and the favorable prejudgments of the Govern- 
ment and of a large part of the public are but 
part. Any one opposing it may expect to be kept 
under strict surveillance in all his movements, his 
mail will be violated, his words, written or over- 
heard, will be scrutinized for material that can be 
used against him. Nor is the line drawn there. 
While I was in prison, I received the confidences 
of many prisoners as to their own experiences, 
among others that of a Maine boy who had been 
convicted of robbing a postoffice. He had been 
arrested in the first instance as a vagrant, and 
while in the local jail had been approached by a 
postoffice inspector who charged him with the post- 
office crime. The boy had never been in the state 
in which the crime was committed; but he was told 
that, if he would plead guilty to it, he would be 
sent to Atlanta for a short term, whereas, should 
he refuse, he could be kept in jail awaiting trial 
for a year, and would then receive at least six 
months on the vagrancy charge. " Do as I tell 
you, and I will see that you get off easy," the 
inspector, who posed as a friend, told him. 



222 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

When he finally acquiesced, however, the judge im- 
posed on him a sentence of five years, the inspector 
having testified that he was an old offender, im- 
plicated in many other crimes. The fact was, of 
course, that the real perpetrators of this postoffice 
robbery had not been caught, but it was expedient 
for the reputation and welfare of the detectives 
that a perpetrator should be produced if not 
the real one, then one manufactured for the pur- 
pose. I learned of many cases similar to this 
it is a common routine practise with the System. 
Moreover, when this innocent youth has completed 
his term, he will be thenceforth a marked man 
" an habitual criminal," with a record against him; 
and he can be rearrested on general principles at 
any time. He will be given no opportunity to earn 
an honest livelihood, and it would be surprising 
indeed if his wrongs, not to speak of his empty 
stomach and hopeless circumstances did not make 
him a bona fide criminal ere long. Obviously, 
meanwhile, such a man is effectively gagged; if he 
be asked whether prison be a paradise, he will 
reply ardently in the affirmative, though his whole 
body and soul know it as a hell. For if, having 
blasphemed the Holy System, he is returned to the 
cell whence he came, every word of his rash revela- 
tion will be avenged upon him in torture and 
misery. 

Am I attempting to retaliate upon the System 
for personal indignities and mishandling; or am I 



The Prison Silence 223 

the dupe and tool of designing miscreants 
convicts, guards or foremen who plied me with 
false statements to wreak revenges of their own? 
I have already said that I was never harshly 
treated by any of the prison officials, and after the 
two first months indulgences were allowed me be- 
yond the customary prison usage. During my two 
first months, to be sure, it seemed unlikely that I 
could live out my term, because I was kept at work 
in an underground place without ventilation or 
other than artificial light, and permeated with the 
hot-water pipes which supplied the buildings with 
heat and power. I was also unable to eat the 
prison fare, and was slowly perishing for lack of 
food. I never complained of this treatment, for 
it was in the ordinary prison course; but when the 
consequences of it became visible in my physical ap- 
pearance, I was put on a diet of oatmeal and milk, 
morning and evening, and allowed to exercise in the 
open air. I voluntarily, during this period, went 
without dinner, being unwilling to poison myself 
with the rancid grease and garbage served under 
that name; but I made the most of the simple but 
nourishing milk diet, though it was insufficient in 
quantity; and I improved to the utmost the out- 
door privileges, besides adhering resolutely to a 
regimen of daily calisthenic exercises; so that, 
when I was set at liberty at the end of six or seven 
months, I was in physical condition quite as good 
as when I went in. I was never denied leave to 



224 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

write " special letters," and my intercourse with 
the warden and his deputies, though always as 
seldom and brief as I could make it, was uniformly 
suave and smiling. The reasons for all which I 
shall have occasion to discuss later. 

So much for the " grouch." As for being made 
the dupe of designing persons among the lower 
officials, and my fellow prisoners, beyond reply- 
ing tersely to questions put to me, I never had any 
communication with the former, and never heard 
or spoke a word with them reflecting upon the 
prison management. But what of my fellow 
prisoners? 

They looked me over keenly and thoroughly to 
begin with ; and no inquisitors have more sensitive 
intuitions or are quicker to suspect double-dealing 
than they. My aspect, my bearing, my speech, my 
affiliations, my treatment, all came under their scru- 
tiny, and were debated in that secret court which 
prisoners hold. Not at first, nor lightly, did they 
give me the honor of their confidence. I might 
be a spy sent in from without, or a stool pigeon 
made within, or I might be indifferent or loose- 
mouthed. But when they did resolve to trust me 
when I was elected a member of the "inner 
circle," as one of them phrased it, they had no 
reservations. I was called on to make no pro- 
testations, to register no oaths, nor did I solicit any 
communications. They came to me freely, and 
either by laboriously penned or penciled letters 



The Prison Silence 225 

written on surreptitious scraps of paper in ill- 
lighted cells, or by circumspect word of mouth 
mumbled into my ear on the baseball ground of 
a Saturday afternoon, they would disclose their 
long hoarded and grievous facts. " I wouldn't 
lie to you, Mr. Hawthorne what would be the 
use? it would come back on me! " But I was 
listening to the break and tremor in their voices, 
the hurry and awkward indignation, the eager 
marshaling of insignificant details, the dreary, 
apathetic recital of sordid or callous outrages, the 
hopelessness striving once more to hope. " If 
they'd only send us an inspector who wouldn't be 
always dining with the warden, and junketting in 
his auto, and taking the screws' word against ours 
a fellow who'd peel off his coat and size things 
up independent ! " Their wish was not fulfilled in 
my time ; the inspections were a farce and a scan- 
dal. There was a tradition of one inspector who 
had really effected something who seemed to 
think of his duty, as well as of good dinners and 
joy rides but that was long ago. That he never 
repeated his visit would seem to indicate that his 
report was found inconvenient. 

Meantime, I did not need their asseverations 
of veracity; the truth shone through their uncouth 
stories. They were widely different from the 
glib patter that runs out of a crook's mouth in the 
presence of an official. Some of these men were 
seasoned criminals; often they did not themselves 



226 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

understand how iniquitous was the " deal " that 
had been given them, being too much inured to the 
tricks and treachery of the detectives 7 practises 
to feel special animosity regarding them; but more 
or less dimly they felt that wrong was being done 
them that was not contemplated or recognized by 
the law. The last thing to die in a man is his sense 
of justice; " I'm as bad a man as you like, and 
I'm willing to take my proper medicine; but they 
ought to give a man a square deal ! " There was 
a young fellow there, well educated, with an intel- 
ligent, agreeable face and gentlemanly bearing; I 
got his story, not from him, but from the remi- 
niscences of others. One time " Bob got nutty, 
and wouldn't come out of his cell, and started 
setting fire to his bedding. His cell got filled with 
the smoke and he was near choking to death, and 
fell down on the floor. A bunch of screws stood 
in front of his door making fun of him, and they 
held a blanket up so the smoke wouldn't get out. 
At last they opened the door and pulled him out, 
and they clubbed him good and plenty, and then 
they dragged him down the stairs he was in an 
upper tier, understand with his head bumping 
against every step. They threw him into a dark 
cell, and left him there." There he had leisure to 
recover from his " nuttiness." It was nothing 
much out of the usual, only the incident happened 
to offer spectacular features which served to keep 



The Prison Silence 227 

the memory of it fresh. But does the Department 
of Justice countenance such diversions? 

To return to my theme I came to feel that 
whether or not I was handled softly, others as 
deserving as I, or less deserving, or more deserv- 
ing, were not; and that if I had no personal 
grounds for complaint, they had. I could not 
adopt the point of view of one of the " better V 
class of convicts: " The warden has always treated 
me decently, and I don't mean to bite the hand that 
caressed me." I need not affirm, either, that my 
good fortune was due to an expectation that I 
would respond in kind ; that would be an unverifia- 
ble inference. But it was plain that the officials 
took interest in the prison paper as a medium for 
advertising and gaining credit for the penitentiary; 
and that when I began to write for it, newspapers 
all over the country quoted the articles and com- 
mented kindly on them. My name was given a 
prominence, unwelcome, though well meant; ac- 
counts of my doings and condition, entirely apocry- 
phal (for I never saw a newspaper man during 
my stay, or gave out any form of interview) , were 
published and featured from time to time; I was 
kept more or less in the public eye. If, now, I 
were to be starved and clubbed, dungeoned and 
otherwise maltreated, not only would I be inca- 
pacitated from contributing to the paper, but some 
hint of the facts might leak out and impair the 



228 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

reputation of Atlanta Penitentiary as a Gentle- 
man's Club and Humane Paradise. Accordingly, 
if I were found smoking out of hours, or were miss- 
ing from count, " Never mind it's only Haw- 
thorne I " It may be, of course, that my personal 
charm was so irresistible that every official from 
the warden down fell victim to it, and would rather 
prove recreant to their oath of office than interfere 
with me ; my vanity craves to believe so, yet I hesi- 
tate. At any rate, with whatever sugar the gag 
was sweetened, or whether the suggestion of it was 
inadvertent, I did not feel justified in accepting it; 
and when I got out, the waiting reporters at last 
obtained what they had so long awaited. But 
though my eight hundred comrades seem to have 
been gratified with my words, I cannot think that 
they were equally satisfactory to the officials ; for I 
am informed that Hawthorne's writings are hence- 
forth barred from the penitentiary. I must have 
hurt their feelings in some way; no one can please 
everybody. 

The naive surprise expressed in some local 
quarters outside the penitentiary went to show how 
unexpected and almost incredible my statements 
appeared to be or, from another point of view, 
how successfully hitherto the truth had been sup- 
pressed. The truth being once unshackled, I was 
anxious to get the widest possible circulation for 
it, and therefore arranged for its publication in 
various newspapers distributed over the country; 



The Prison Silence 229 

but I was not altogether sanguine that my plan 
of public enlightenment would prove an unquali- 
fied success. The System, as I have indicated, had 
several guns which it might bring to bear, and it 
was conceivable that some of the editors who had 
subscribed to the syndicate might find reason to 
regard the articles as not adapted to the taste of 
their readers, and decline to risk offending them 
any further. If other guns of the System should 
prove inadequate, there was always the great gun 
to be depended upon, known as the Law for Libel. 
I took what precautions I could with respect to this 
formidable and most respectable weapon; I stipu- 
lated that a competent lawyer should read each 
article before it was offered for publication, and in- 
form me of any passage in any of them which 
might be obnoxious to the provisions of this law, 
in order that such passages might be modified or 
expunged. He carefully discharged his function; 
and if any reader should detect a lack of continuity 
or explicitness in any of my statements, he may 
charitably ascribe it to the consequences of the 
lawyer's advice ; since, even in this free country, the 
proprieties must be observed. If I were fortunate 
enough to escape the missiles of the Libel gun, 
I had still to be on my guard against more obscure 
and personal weapons; I am an ex-convict, and any 
lenity of treatment which I had hitherto enjoyed 
is not to be looked for in the future. If I were 
sent back to prison, my shrift was likely to be short; 



230 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

and I could only hope, in that event, to have been 
able to say enough to afford my entertainers ample 
provocation for giving me, as my comrades would 
say, the limit. 

" You would have only yourself to blame ! " 
I hear that comment. If you are kicked, be like 
the puppy roll over on your back and hold up 
your paws for mercy. But if canine models are 
in question, I feel more inclination to the thorough- 
bred bulldog, who does what he can and would 
do more if he could. I have undertaken a heavy 
responsibility, and must make the best showing 
I may with it. I no longer have a lifetime before 
me, but I have learned while I have been alive 
that the methods of the puppy are not remunera- 
tive in the end. Every natural instinct in me calls 
out for rest and peace, and to forget the valleys 
of grief and humiliation; but there is another 
voice which summons me to other issues. I am 
sensible of my lack of strength and fitness for the 
enterprise ; but I believe that it was no idle circum- 
stance that called me to it; I believe in a Divine 
government of the world, which chooses some- 
times to use unlikely instruments to accomplish its 
will. The little I can do may inspire worthier 
deeds by more powerful hands. Emerson found 
simple words for a mighty thought 

"One accent of the Holy Ghost 
The heedless world hath never lost ! " 

The prophets of old had no dignity or weight in 



The Prison Silence 231 

themselves, but they delivered messages which 
changed the world. " What ! that old numskull 
be the mouthpiece of Jehovah? " his townsfolk 
might exclaim. But so it was. What is any one 
of us in himself? 

However, I don't wish to bear too hard on this 
pedal. It is easier to look at things from the com- 
monplace standpoint. One thing or another pre- 
vented any of my companions in the jail from do- 
ing what it was desirable to do, and circumstances 
quite unforeseen opened a way for me to do it. 
What I have said above was with a view of show- 
ing how difficult it may ordinarily be to bring 
prison facts to light; and if, by chance, some indi- 
vidual should find means to his hand to open a 
window, he would be a poltroon if he forbore to 
do it. I am under no illusions as to the obstacles 
in my way, nor do I anticipate that what I am 
trying to do will result in prompt or vital changes 
for the better in prison management. The facts 
I adduce may be discredited, but if they are true 
they will not be lost. My eight hundred inarticu- 
late comrades are always present in my thoughts. 
I have left them in the body, but I see their faces 
wherever I turn. It is a crime that any human 
beings should be arbitrarily kept in the conditions 
which surround them, and if I can loosen one stone 
of the Bastile which, at Atlanta and elsewhere, an- 
nually engulfs and destroys so many of them, I 
shall be content. 



XIII 
THE BANQUETS OF THE DAMNED 

THE walls of jails are good non-conductors 
of what goes on behind them, and this ap- 
plies to other prisons as well as to that at Atlanta. 
Yet once in a while a groan or protest, or a partial 
account of some outbreak, finds its way through; 
and in many cases the gist of the story is to the 
effect that the food is bad or scanty. Other 
things the men behind the bars suffer stoically, or 
not so stoically; but lack of food arouses them to 
despair and frenzy. We have lately heard re- 
ports from Sing Sing illustrative of this condition 
there; and many another jail could echo the com- 
plaints of the unfortunates in that gloomy hell- 
chamber. 

Convicts know that they are to be punished, that 
the government has sentenced them, that it is the 
law; and though they may find cause to disagree 
with the decree that consigns them to hopeless 
and useless servitude, they accept it as at least 
legal and incident to the game as played. But 
they do not believe that the government has con- 
demned them to starvation, or to poisoning (and 
the condition in which food often comes to the 

232 



The Banquets of the Damned 233 

convicts' table is practically poisonous) . They 
know that no such punishment is included in the 
statutes; and they can only conclude, therefore, 
that it is an arbitrary and illegal piece of cruelty 
or neglect on the part of the warden or com- 
missary officer. They are prone to think that 
these persons profit financially by cutting down 
their supplies; and that they are careful to con- 
ceal the fact in their reports to the Department, 
or to disguise it as a meritorious economy. At 
the same time, they are conscious that there is 
no regular channel through which they can make 
their injury known to the authorities, and that 
nothing is more readily denied, or more easily 
concealed from inspectors, than is this very abuse. 

But the suffering which it occasions is constant 
and cumulative. They are still required to per- 
form their labor, as if in full physical vigor. They 
are punished if physical weakness causes them to 
fall short in their tasks. They feel their vitality 
ebbing, they find themselves ever less able to resist 
the inroads of disease, their appeals to the doctors 
are often met with sneers and even animosity; and 
what marvel is it that stoicism and patience at 
last give way, and they break out in some wild and 
savage excess which justifies the resort by their 
masters to the dungeon and the bullet? But death 
may well seem to the rebels preferable to the lin- 
gering pains of the alternative fate. 

The under nourishment and malnourishment of 



234 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

convicts is, in fact, one of the worst crimes of the 
many which their despots perpetrate upon them. 
From any point of view, it is barbarous and wicked 
the crime of a Weyler upon the defenseless 
Cuban revolutionists, which, as much as the de- 
struction of the Maine, impelled this country to 
declare war. Yet, knowing as we do that it is 
perpetrated upon the human beings in our prisons, 
we sit supine and acquiescent, and thereby make 
the crime our own. 

Have you not imagination enough to put your- 
self for a moment in the predicament of the pris- 
oner ? There you sit in the narrow gloom of your 
cell, or you toil in the stifling confinement of your 
work room, and such is not only your state to-day, 
but for years to come it will be unchanged. You 
are isolated from sight of and association with 
every man and woman in the world who cares 
for you or thinks kindly of you; silence and rigid 
obedience are imposed upon you; you meet no 
looks that are not harsh, and hear no words but 
sharp commands or angry menaces. Your very 
toil is idle and unpaid, and its diligent perform- 
ance brings you no credit or hope, except treacher- 
ous promises of a good constantly delayed. And 
then picture yourself when, after wearisome hours, 
the whistle blows that means intermission of labor 
and the renewal of strength by food. Yet that 
summons, instead of cheering you, does but make 
the burden of your misery heavier. 



The Banquets of the Damned 235 

Sullenly and heavily, in the endless line, you 
tramp into the huge, comfortless hall, with its 
hideous tables and benches, and as you pass up the 
aisles you glance abhorrently at the dirty scraps 
and masses of provender dumped carelessly out 
of noisome buckets by the filthy hands of the serv- 
ers upon plates still rough and foul with the hard- 
ened grease of foregoing meals. You are faint 
for lack of nourishment, yet the sight of what is 
provided, and the unclean smell of it, nauseate 
instead of inviting you. Eat you must, if you 
would live and have strength to work, yet if you 
eat you invite sickness and suffering, and if you 
could eat all, and assimilate it, you would still leave 
the table but half fed. 

Every tyro in physiology knows the effect upon 
the general organism of dejection and resentment 
at meals. Prisoners more than men in any other 
condition need abundance to eat and good cheer 
while eating; but the food they get, and the cir- 
cumstances in which they get it, causes them to 
degenerate physically, and the body affects the 
mind. Physical disease breeds the disease of 
evil thoughts and impulses. Criminals might be 
generated by prison food alone, without taking ac- 
count of their previous records and future pros- 
pects. 

We of Atlanta penitentiary used to hear oc- 
casionally of the bills-of-fare of our repasts in the 
prison that were daily forwarded to Washington, 



236 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

by way of reassuring the Department of Justice, 
and whom else it might concern, as to the sub- 
stance and excellence of our nourishment. - These 
alimentary documents might be compared with 
like lists at Delmonico's and the Waldorf, and 
the names of the viands would be found to be 
identical. The inference, to the legal mind, not 
to speak of the penological one, was plain: the 
convicts at the penitentiary fared as sumptuously 
as do the banqueters of the Four Hundred at 
no cost, moreover, to themselves, not even wait- 
ers' tips. 

For here were rich soups and gravies, substan- 
tial roast beef, succulent steaks and chops, the re- 
nowned baked beans of legend, comforting hashes, 
pies and puddings, fresh vegetables, including the 
famous sweet potato of the South in its pride; and 
long draughts of milk from the tranquil cows of 
the pasture, together with tea and coffee from the 
Orient, sugar, mustard, salt and pepper and vine- 
gar, enough to beguile the most squeamish appe- 
tite, and, to top off with, fruits in their season, led 
by the incomparable Georgia watermelon. I may 
have inadvertently omitted some items from this 
toothsome list, but it is enough as it stands to 
make an epicure's mouth water. And if any skep- 
tic were still unconvinced, a photographer would 
be admitted with his undeniable camera at certain 
seasons Christmas and Fourth of July, for ex- 
ample who would place a picture of the revelry 



The Banquets of the Damned 237 

and the revelers on the everlasting records, with 
garlands and festive decorations, and actual dishes 
of some sort on the groaning boards, and serried 
rows of plump felons ready to fall to. 

The fame of all this went forth into the world, 
and Atlanta Penitentiary, its warden, its guards, 
and its cooks shine in penal annals as the acme 
and ideal of modern humanitarian ideas upon the 
reclamation of convicts through gentleness and 
love, and a full stomach. 

I found opportunity to study some of these his- 
toric scrolls, and was so much impressed by them 
that I caused a suggestion to be conveyed to the 
warden. Instead of sending all the menus to 
Washington, and to admiring friends in the At- 
lanta neighborhood, let one or two of them be 
placed at each meal upon the tables of the diners, 
to the end that they might be stimulated, by the 
perusal of these literary masterpieces, to choke 
down their gullets the actual garbage which was 
furnished in the name thereof. But the warden's 
views seem not to have been in harmony with mine 
on this occasion. I am glad to learn, however, 
from certain graduates of the institution since my 
own departure from it, that the food has greatly 
improved in quantity and somewhat even in qual- 
ity, since these chapters began to appear in news- 
papers. 

I need not attempt to fathom the reason. If it 
were incomparable before, why or how better it? 



238 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

It could hardly have been done at the instance of 
the old and warm personal friend of the warden 
and the Attorney-General who was sent to -Atlanta 
recently in the guise of a Spartan inspector of 
the alleged abuses ; because, for one thing, the im- 
provement had set in long before he made his in- 
vestigation, and the investigator, in his report, ap- 
pears to have discovered no room for improvement 
anywhere. It must have just happened one of 
those miracles in the way of gilding refined gold 
and painting the lily which are so common nowhere 
else as in our model penal institutions. 

I had ample opportunity to study the subject 
personally while a guest at the prison table, and 
to compare my impressions with those of my fel- 
low prisoners, as well as to enlarge them by con- 
ferences with persons employed in the kitchen and 
commissary department. Men who had served in 
other prisons and their combined experiences 
covered a great many were unanimous and em- 
phatic in declaring that the table at Atlanta was 
the worst they had ever known, not only as to 
scantness of supply, but as to the unwholesomeness 
or positively poisonous quality of the food fur- 
nished. But let me tell a little of what I saw and 
knew myself. 

When the change was made from long tables 
and benches to tables seating eight and chairs, it 
was announced that table cloths would also be 
supplied, and napkins. That was two or three 



The Banquets of the Damned 239 

years ago, but table cloths have not yet appeared, 
and the eaters still wipe their mouths on the backs 
of their hands in the good old way. Pepper and 
salt were on the table, and a bottle of something 
that looked like beer and was supposed to be vine- 
gar, but was sampled only by the more reckless or 
inexperienced convicts. Sugar was not provided 
except on rare occasions, and to " diet " prisoners 

men who were restricted to bread and milk and 
oatmeal. Some beverage that dishonored the 
name of tea was served about once a fortnight; a 
brown, semi-transparent rinsing of dirty kettles, 
sugarless, thin and bitter, called coffe'e, came every 
day; but if your stomach rejected either of these, 
you could fill up on plain water. 

The latter, however, like the " diet " milk and 
oatmeal and the drinkables generally, had to be 
taken out of metal mugs covered with white en- 
amel, minute particles of which chipped off and 
mingled with what you drank. These particles 
were hard and sharp, like pure glass, and they cut 
and lodged in the intestines, causing, with other 
things, an excessive predisposition to appendicitis 

a frequent disease in the penitentiary. This 
was also promoted by the bread, which was made 
of the poorest grade of white flour, without nour- 
ishing quality, the value per loaf being about two 
cents; the flour was ground in steel mills, and 
microscopic particles of steel were rubbed off into 
it this fact I had from a physician who had ex- 



240 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

amined it. The flour, when received at the prison, 
was frequently full of weevils, most of which but 
not all were sifted out before it was used. The 
bread was tasteless and light; it was baked in large 
quantities, and what was not consumed by the 
prisoners was sold outside. 

It is not provided in the prison regulations that 
officials shall be fed at the expense of the prison- 
ers. Nevertheless, a separate and superior grade 
of flour is purchased at government expense, and 
is used to make bread which is given to the officials ; 
the loaves are placed in the outer corridor, and 
are taken away by guards and others every day. 
Separate cooks are also assigned to prepare the 
officials' food on the prison ranges; the meats and 
vegetables are of a grade much better than is sup- 
plied to prisoners; but some favored prisoners 
participate in their consumption. The higher of- 
ficials have the best food the market affords and 
in such ample abundance that certain prison pets, 
usually negroes, get their main subsistence from 
the surplus. 

The beef given to prisoners was of the third 
grade the worst on the market it is cow or 
bull beef, never heifer or steer, and often it is 
rotten, and must be treated chemically before be- 
ing offered even to prisoners. It used to come on 
the table in gristly and bony gobbets, after having 
lain on the kitchen ranges for hours, until it was 
reduced to a hardness which resisted all but the 



The Banquets of the Damned 241 

most efficient and vigorous teeth (which, except 
with negroes, are rare in prison). I used to com- 
pare these u steaks " and other pieces with old 
blackened boot heels; they were hardly less eatable 
and nourishing. Often it smelt so that nature 
rebelled against it; but complaints were liable to 
be met by committal to the solitary cells. 

But groups of visitors used to appear in the din- 
ing room occasionally; they were lined up along the 
wall adjoining the door, and were not allowed to 
walk between the tables, so that the only food 
they could see was what was put on the tables 
nearest the door; and this was always of a 
quality superior to the rest, and there was more 
of it per man. It was one of the little tricks em- 
ployed to maintain the entente cordiale, by which 
the prisoners who sat at those tables benefited, and 
the visitors went forth to sing the praises of our 
warm hearted warden. On the days when the 
bread was sour or the meat stank, visitors were 
headed away from the dining room, and their at- 
tention directed to more important matters. 

The hash, which often made the breakfast, was 
composed of fragments of gristle and refuse left 
on the prisoners' plates after dinner, mixed with 
potatoes and rancid grease; this, and the soups and 
gravies, which had a similar origin, gave out a most 
nauseating smell. The men would gulp it down 
it was that, or starve trying to help it on 
its way with all the condiments they could lay 



242 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

hands on; but the effect of it, and of the food gen- 
erally, upon the digestive tract was so disastrous 
in most cases that they might better havje left it 
alone. I myself retired from the enterprise in my 
second or third week, and would have literally died 
of inanition had not the doctor, moved by I know 
not what suggestion (not mine), put me on the 
milk and oatmeal diet during the remainder of my 
sojourn. This applied for breakfast and supper; 
I sat at dinner, but satisfied myself with nibbling 
bread crusts, and witnessing the forlorn and peril- 
ous efforts of my friends to walk the line between 
starvation and acute indigestion. Not many were 
successful. 

For vegetables we had Irish and sweet potatoes, 
turnip tops (uneatable), black-eyed beans, bitter 
and greasy, and once a month, perhaps, a tomato. 
The butter was made of an inferior quality of 
lard, and cottonseed oil a substance which en- 
tered into many other of our viands, and of which, 
with grease, it was calculated by an expert in 
the kitchen, we were offered as much as one pound 
per man every day. It produced a calamitous 
effect upon the digestive tract, inasmuch as there 
was hardly a white man in the prison who did not 
suffer chronically from stomach troubles con- 
stant suffering, often becoming acute. The strong- 
est digestions would resist for a while, but finally 
succumb. 

There was a poultry farm on the grounds, do- 



The Banquets of the Damned 243 

nated by outside benefactors specifically and ex- 
clusively for the benefit of prisoners, beginning 
with the tuberculous patients. After it got going, 
there may have been an average of six hundred 
fowls on the place. Of these, not one ever ap- 
peared on the prison tables. With the exception 
of a possible few that were stolen by prisoners 
having access to the yard, all were appropriated by 
higher officials, and the eggs as well. 

One official gave frequent dinner parties to his 
friends, and was said to use as many as five or 
six chickens a day, though I cannot vouch for that 
it seems excessive. He certainly, sometimes, 
commandeered as many as fourteen or more at 
one time. There was a story of a great cake which 
he had made for some festival, into the composi- 
tion of which entered one hundred and four eggs 
from our farm. To neither chickens nor eggs had 
he, of course, any title more legitimate than have 
you who read these lines. He had a large and 
hungry household, and many guests among 
them, commonly, such government inspectors as 
were sent down from Washington, to see whether 
he and his fellow officials were honestly discharg- 
ing their functions. 

As for the tuberculous patients, I was never able 
to find any of them who had eaten chicken from 
the farm, or any part of one. Some chicken soup 
was at one time ordered for a patient by the doc- 
tor; a prisoner (a famous physician), a deputy of 



244 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

the doctor, happened to be at the tuberculosis 
camp when the soup arrived from the kitchen. It 
consisted of some warm water with the_shank 
not the drumstick, but the shank and foot of 
a fowl in it. This aroused his interest, and twite 
again he was present when a chicken soup pre- 
scribed appeared at the camp. On both occasions 
he stands ready so to testify under oath he 
found the same foot and shank in it, but nothing 
else recalling chicken. The foot was identified by 
an imperfection in one of its toes. 

Eggs were indeed provided for the hospital 
prisoners (never for the general mass), but they 
were cold storage eggs, the cheapest grade that 
could be bought in the market, and that is saying 
much for this sort of product nowadays. Out of 
one mess of eight that were served in the hospital, 
and of which I gained authentic news from the pris- 
oner physician already referred to, six were bad. 
I am informed that these notes and comments of 
mine are not permitted to be read by the prisoners; 
but perhaps the original donors of the poultry 
farm may see them, and be prompted to inquire 
into their accuracy. Let us return to the dining 
room. 

Sweet potatoes abound in the South, and sub- 
sistence upon them exclusively would reduce the 
cost of living; the only trouble is that the human 
stomach refuses to cooperate in this economy. 
Sweet potatoes were served at Atlanta during the 



The Banquets of the Damned 245 

season three times a day, baked, boiled and in 
pies; the men were hungry enough, and the supply 
of potatoes was adequate ; but had they been of the 
finest instead of the worst quality in the market, the 
experiment would have failed; starvation proved 
preferable ; we could not get them down. That 
soft, slimy sweetness, foul with dirt and often 
tainted with decay, reappearing day after day at 
every meal for weeks on end, outdid endurance, 
nor could we be stimulated by the argument that 
the Government was saving money by it. Had 
the sweet potato season lasted the year round, the 
warden would have lost his job from mere dearth 
of prisoners to earn his salary on. 

I do not forget the corn, either; it was of the 
brand fed to farm animals; but this enumeration 
becomes monotonous. We had apple pies once 
a week or so ; and I was told by an employee in the 
kitchen, who had been a farmer in his time, that 
the apples were such as could be bought at a 
dollar a barrel, and that the charge appearing in 
bills submitted to the Government was five dollars. 
The quality of the apples in the pies supports my 
informant's contention. As for the watermelons 
a benefactor of the prisoners bought a con- 
signment of them sufficient for the prison popula- 
tion, to be eaten on the Fourth of July, 1913. 
The contract was for the best melons obtainable; 
and Georgia is famous for good melons. A day or 
two before the Fourth, the benefactor called at the 



246 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

prison, and asked to see the melons, which had 
been delivered some time before. Examination 
showed them to be of an inferior grade, such as 
farmers used for cattle and poultry. It was too 
late, however, to get a fresh supply, and the bene- 
factor had the mortification of seeing the kindly 
meant gift dishonored. It is pertinent, here, that 
there is said to be an individual in Atlanta not 
officially connected with the penitentiary who is 
commissioned to make all purchases for the prison 
food, tobacco, and other supplies. He buys the 
stuff, and hands in his bills; but the bills he pays 
are not submitted. It is conceivable that there 
may be a discrepancy between the two amounts, 
and it might be interesting to learn whether he 
alone benefits by it. 

Guards walk up and down the aisles between the 
tables, during meals, to keep order and also to 
attend to complaints or requests from prisoners. 
There is also the man in the window with the 
loaded magazine rifle, ready to settle any com- 
plaints that become too insistent. The common 
protest is against the badness of a specific piece 
of food, or against some example of dirt. The 
former seldom get relief; in the latter case, the 
dish or cup is sometimes changed. 

A prisoner at my table called the guard's at- 
tention to a quid of tobacco which had got into his 
soup. The guard, who was of a humorous turn, 
replied, smiling, " Well, you use tobacco, don't 



The Banquets of the Damned 247 

you? " and passed on. This was the same guard 
who assaulted and clubbed a prisoner whom he 
was taking downstairs, as described in a previous 
chapter. On another occasion, a prisoner com- 
plained that there was a beetle in his hash. An 
examination was made; but whether the beetle was 
alive and got away, or whether the prisoner him- 
self had " bugs," as the slang is, at any rate the 
examiners reported no beetle,. The matter was 
then brought before the authorities, who ordered 
the complainant to the dark hole. 

Another day, following some months of constant 
deterioration in the food, and diminution in the 
quantity of it, a dinner of hash and bread was 
served, and both bread and hash were sour. The 
air of the room was full of the sour smell; the 
captain came down the aisle near mine, and a pris- 
oner had the boldness to stop him and hold up his 
plate. " It's sour, Captain! " said he. The cap- 
tain looked the man in the eye and replied sternly, 
"It is not sour!" " But, Captain" " I say 
it is not sour! " the other repeated with a threat- 
ening look. It was either submit, or the hole ; the 
man sat down. 

But a few minutes later, some one hissed; be- 
fore he could be identified, hisses came from every 
part of the room. It was a critical juncture. The 
captain ordered the band to play, and play it did at 
the top of its compass; but the hissing was audible 
and continued through the playing. Presently the 



248 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

men got up and began to march out; it was then 
that a group of guards from the smoking room 
below came running up the stairs armed with clubs 
and revolvers and tried to get through the barred 
door at the stair head, but were checked by the 
captain, who was a wise tactician. The men went 
to their cells, and there began to howl and screech 
like a crazy menagerie, and kept it up for hours. 
Twenty or thirty of the supposed ringleaders were 
sent to the dark holes; but the revolt was not 
checked until the warden personally promised re- 
forms, and gave his word that no further punish- 
ments should be inflicted fair promises, made 
to be broken. 

The dining room windows were protected by 
wire netting; but there were many holes in it, as 
large as a man's head, through which the flies, in 
summer, entered in swarms ; and there was no pro- 
vision for keeping them out of the kitchen, which 
opened into the dining room. Complaints were 
constantly made, but the holes were never mended, 
and no means were taken to kill the flies. Food 
sometimes was placed on the tables hours before 
the men sat down to their meals, and the flies, not 
having the same delicacy of appetite as the men, 
feasted freely in the meanwhile. There was also 
frequent protest against the bits of loose enamel 
in the bowls; many of these were made direct to 
the doctor; but he did nothing. If a man whose 
digestion had given way called on him for help, a 



The Banquets of the Damned 249 

dose of salts was the only reply, and several 
deaths, while I was there, unquestionably had their 
beginning in this neglect. Upon the whole, con- 
tentment with starvation was the most prudent 
policy in Atlanta Penitentiary. 

I am not a sybarite or an epicure. For fifteen 
years before I was sent to prison I lived on the 
hardest and most Spartan diet, eating as little 
food as possible and that of the simplest kind. 
Wheat, milk, a few green vegetables, and fruit 
made my menus. I was therefore better fortified 
against hardships than the majority of prisoners; 
I could hold out against starvation longer; but 
against the poison of rotten or bad food I had no 
protection. 

The wardens and the chief clerks of prisons 
often wish, for motives of their own, to make an 
economical showing, and perhaps do not much care 
if it is made at the expense of the health or lives 
of prisoners. Some friends of mine in Atlanta 
prison and myself made an attempt to determine 
just what was paid out per man in the prison for 
subsistence; we quietly obtained statements from 
men in the kitchen and commissary departments, 
and made our calculations. After careful revision, 
the figures showed that we were being fed at the 
rate of from eight to eleven cents per head, a 
day. 

About that time, a great scientific discovery was 
announced by the chief steward. Food, he had 



250 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

been informed, contained a certain amount of heat 
and power; and these heat units, called calories, 
could be estimated for any given artick of diet. 
(As I write this, an editorial on the subject in a 
recent issue of a New York newspaper states the 
matter in terms which I am happy to reproduce.) 
u Physiologists have determined by repeated ex- 
periments that a definite quantity of certain foods 
furnishes a definite number of calories or heat 
units, which produce a certain quantity of energy 
in the animal or human body. ... In twenty-four 
hours a normal man of about one hundred and 
thirty pounds at rest, needs 1680 calories or heat 
units, while a man doing severe physical labor 
would require sufficient food to produce 3000 cal- 
ories. . . . Since the efficiency of labor depends 
upon the energy of the body and this energy or 
power is produced by the food, it is not difficult to 
calculate the actual outlay required for this pur- 
pose. . . . The household requirements of a 
family where two servants are kept would at this 
rate be from $1.00 to $1.40 a day, a sum sufficient 
to furnish all the energy for all purposes of nor- 
mal maintenance." 

Such being the case, our steward figured that 
the convicts could be well enough supported by 
about 2500 calories apiece; and upon making a 
scientific estimate of the calories in our average 
bill-of-fare, he found that we were being overfed 
rather than the contrary. Meat, so many calories ; 



The Banquets of the Damned 251 

soup, so many; sweet potatoes, so many; bread, so 
many; and so on. It was found possible, on this 
basis, to retrench here and there; the bills were 
reduced it was hoped that we might ultimately 
beat even eight cents. The sole difficulty appeared 
to be that the men, the subjects of the experiment, 
began incomprehensibly and perhaps maliciously 
to starve. 

I was fortunate enough to have access to a physi- 
cian (a fellow prisoner), of forty years' eminence 
in his profession, who solved the enigma for me. 
The sum of his comment was this: "Put a 
Delmonico dinner in one bucket, and an equal bulk 
of swill or garbage in another; the number of 
calories may be the same in both. The steward, 
in his calculation, has forgotten to consider the 
condition in which the food is served its eatable- 
ness, in short. If men could devour swill, it would 
be all right; but if they cannot, they will starve 
in spite of calories." 

So the steward's calories became a byword and 
a mockery in the prison for many weeks afterward. 

Similar conditions, perhaps due to the same 
cause, seem to have obtained at Sing Sing and 
elsewhere. It is not enough that prison food 
should be sufficient in amount; it must also be of a 
quality such that the men are able to get it down 
their throats. Nor are the doctor's salts a rem- 
edy; their violent and abnormal action finally par- 
alyze the excretory and digestive powers of the 



252 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

organism, and the man dies from poisons gener- 
ated by indigestible food in his own system. Even 
keeping him in the dark hole fails to recuperate 
him, though it has been constantly tried at Atlanta, 
and very likely in other reformatory institutions. 

Plenty of vigorous and hearty outdoor exercise 
would help much; not the exercise of prison toil, 
which but deepens the darkness of the heart; but 
exercise for its own sake, for the cheer and ex- 
citement of it. Much has been said of the base- 
ball at Atlanta Penitentiary; and doubtless it has 
been of benefit. But only a handful of the prison- 
ers, and nine-tenths of them negroes, play the 
game ; the others can only stand and look on. The 
games occur, weather permitting, once a week, on 
Saturdays. From Saturday at half past three until 
Monday morning at half past seven, the men are 
locked in their cells, absolutely inactive in body, 
and abandoned to such mental activities as, for the 
most part, breed no good either for themselves or 
others. The only outlet is the Sunday church 
service hour a crowded session in a blank hall, 
with rifles ready to subdue any disorder. A very 
apostle might fail in his efforts under such circum- 
stances ; and very apostles are few. 

A man who is sick and sad day after day and 
year after year, and conscious of his impotence 
to amend his state, is in no mood for moral 
reform. Much of the sickness might be averted 
if the medical treatment at the outset of disease 



The Banquets of the Damned 253 

were such as to encourage the patients to avail 
themselves of advice. But each man, as he comes 
up in the sick line every morning, is met with in- 
difference or insults ; he is presumed to be a maling- 
erer unless he can prove himself genuine on the 
instant; the only other recourse is to become so 
sick as to be beyond help of medicine, and then, 
taken belated to the hospital, to die outright. The 
consequence is that the men will suffer silently in 
their cells rather than appeal to the doctor; and 
many diseases become ineradicable from this 
cause. 

Even a convict, when he is miserable and weak 
from illness, shrinks from facing rough and un- 
sympathetic handling and words in the doctor's 
room, with a good chance of being sent to the hole 
if he remonstrates. The doctor of a prison could 
be its good angel, if he would. 



XIV 
THE POLICY OF FALSEHOOD 

THE subterranean brotherhood waxes cu- 
riously indignant over being lied to by prison 
officials. For why should criminals, whose suc- 
cess in their trade must depend largely on lies 
either spoken or acted, be resentful when they 
are paid back in their own base coin? I am in- 
clined to think that the anomaly may be due to 
some survival in prisoners of the old belief, that 
honor and fair play do, or should, exist in officers 
of justice; although their own experience should 
admonish them that officers of prisons, at least, 
cultivate the art and practise of fighting the devil 
with fire (as we say), and so far from ever think- 
ing of keeping faith with a convict, study the art 
of deceiving and hoodwinking him, and appear to 
derive no small amusement from their results. In- 
deed, any tendency on the part of a guard or other 
official in a prison to deal honestly and above board 
with their charges would at once awaken suspicion 
of his loyalty to the " system," and his superiors 
would be apt to improve the first opportunity of 
getting rid of him. 

The lies told to prisoners are sometimes told for 
254 



The Policy of Falsehood 255 

art's sake merely for the delight of the artist in 
his fabrication. There is fun in overcoming the 
suspicions and skepticism of some old timer, and 
beguiling him into the belief that for once, and at 
last, he really is getting trustworthy information 
that he has finally succeeded in touching the 
elusive hem of the robe of Truth. But commonly 
the official liar has some practical object in view. 
This object is usually the tightening of the prison's 
grip upon the convict; not only to strengthen the 
bonds which confine his body, but to bring his 
spirit or soul under more complete subjection and 
to make him feel that so far from moral reform 
being the end sought in his incarceration, he will 
best consult his private interests by abandoning all 
thoughts of decency and honor, and acting, with 
the officials, against the welfare and hopes of his 
own fellows. 

The consequence of the falsehood policy in 
prisons is, for one thing, that the men most worth- 
less morally are uniformly those who get most 
favors. Men of unbroken spirit are handled in a 
hostile manner, and are subjected to a regimen 
calculated either to kill or cure their obstinacy and 
themselves. " You have no right to do this 
there is no law for it! " the convict may protest. 
The reply is a sneer : " What are you going to do 
about it ? " What do you think you would do in 
such circumstances? write to the President, or 
to some Senator or Congressman? awaken the 



256 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

country to these iniquities ? The warden and the 
clerk will smile over your letter, and drop it in 
the waste-basket, or will make it the basis of an 
adverse report against you to the Department, 
insubordination, incorrigibility, insanity perhaps. 

Or, if you reserve your protest till after you 
get out, and can then find any medium for ventilat- 
ing it, the prison authorities will promptly and 
smilingly "welcome an investigation"; and the 
Department will eagerly send down some old 
friend and boon companion of the officials, to make 
a " strict investigation," " without fear or favor." 
Now, at last, the truth shall be known, let it 
hurt whom it may ! So the severe and incorrupti- 
ble inspector comes down; and after snubbing and 
insulting a few prisoners, and taking notes of the 
information of a few snitches, and dining and 
wining with the officials, and inspecting the country 
in the government automobile, he goes back to 
Washington with the reassuring news that the re- 
ports of abuses, where they were not absolute fabri- 
cations, were gross exaggerations. 

Is this an imaginative sketch or colored a lit- 
tle or a good deal? How shall it be deter- 
mined? for I am only an ex-convict, and we all 
know what an ex-convict's word is worth. I can 
only suggest that, for your own individual satis- 
faction at any rate, you commit a bona fide crime 
and get sentenced to prison for it. If you survive, 
we can converse further on the subject.- Or to 



The Policy of Falsehood 257 

offer a bolder suggestion yet perhaps the head 
of the Department himself might take a hand; per- 
haps he would oblige us by breaking a law. Let 
him be handcuffed and brought to Atlanta or else- 
where we are not particular and there be 
numbered and U. S. P.'d and set to work. After 
a ten years' experience, or, if his time be valuable, 
a year and a day might do, let him write his report, 
and I for one will abide by it. 

The prison policy of falsehood may be illus- 
trated by the uses to which the parole law is put. 
This unfortunate measure was no doubt conceived 
by its parents in love and charity, to supply prison- 
ers with a stimulus to reform by rewarding them 
for it with early release from imprisonment. If a 
man's conduct while serving his sentence had been 
orderly and obedient to rules, he was to be freed 
after serving about one-third of his appointed 
time; but he was required, for a reasonable period 
thereafter, to make monthly reports to the prison, 
and to show that he was usefully employed and was 
not frequenting drinking saloons or otherwise go- 
ing astray. A parole board was appointed to 
carry out the law and to look after the paroled 
prisoner, helping him if necessary to get employ- 
ment. Meetings of the board were to be held at 
stated times, to pass upon applications for parole; 
it was to consist of the warden and the doctor 
of the prison, together with the president of the 
parole board, who officiated at all Federal prisons, 



258 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

and who would, naturally, be the superior official 
of the three. But two members of the board 
would form a quorum; and meetings of the board 
at times other than those regularly required could 
be held if thought desirable. 

This looked humane and innocent, and raised 
great hopes in prisoners; and an improvement in 
their general demeanor was soon observable. 
Question soon arising as to whether life prisoners 
could be brought under the new law, it was de- 
cided that lifers who had served fifteen years were 
eligible, if of good record, not an extravagant 
act of mercy, and in obtaining this concession it 
was made known that the warden of Atlanta Peni- 
tentiary was instrumental. Of course the reputa- 
tion of Atlanta as a model and humane prison was 
greatly enhanced thereby. 

But the prisoners, and perhaps the framers of 
the law also, had overlooked one little word in 
the language of the law, which grew to have a 
large significance afterward. The language is, 
that if the prisoner's conduct has been correct, etc., 
he may be granted parole. If, for that harmless 
looking " may," had been substituted " shall," or 
" must/' the secret annals of federal prisons since 
then would have been spared much rascality, cor- 
ruption, cruelty, torture and death; and prisoners 
would not have hated and distrusted their keep- 
ers as they do now, and subordination on one side 



The Policy of Falsehood 259 

and humanity on the other would have received 
an impetus. 

That "may" rendered it optional with the 
board to grant or to refuse parole in any given 
case; they might not only determine whether or 
not the conduct of the applicant had been, while 
serving his sentence, good enough to justify clem- 
ency; but also whether, even then, it were expedient 
to exercise it. No matter how unexceptionable the 
behavior of a prisoner were shown to be, it was 
open to the board to say to him, " We hold that 
your liberation would be inimical to the welfare of 
society, and we cannot therefore recommend it to 
the Department." 

The prisoner, going before the board unsup- 
ported by the advice of counsel, had no further re- 
course; he must go back to his cell feeling that 
all his efforts to be obedient (persisted in through 
what discouragements only prisoners know) had 
been futile ; that he was not a whit better off than 
was a man who had defied every regulation, and 
was worse off in so far as he had taken all his 
pains and indulged all his hopes for nothing. He 
must serve out his time; for if he renewed his ap- 
plication at the next meeting of the board, he was 
told that nothing could be done in his case except 
upon the presentation of " new evidence." 

New evidence of what? The obstacle he had 
to meet was the arbitrary opinion, or fiat, of the 



260 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

board that it would not be a good thing to set him 
free ; with what argument, except his good conduct, 
which had already proved unavailing, could he 
hope to reverse it? The decision left him help- 
less and hopeless, and with a sense of despotic in- 
justice on the part of the authorities which was 
anything but conducive to good discipline in him 
or in his comrades who were conversant with his 
fate. 

Obviously, however, there was a weak point in 
this kind of arbitrary rulings of the board; it was 
conceivable that some enterprising Attorney-Gen- 
eral might want to know why the board had not 
held the good conduct specified in the law to be 
sufficient ground for freeing the man. To guard 
against this, the services of a subordinate called the 
parole officer were called in. This person's nor- 
mal functions as indicated in the law were to help 
paroled men to procure employment, to aid them 
in general in their efforts toward a better life, and 
to stand by them as an authoritative and kindly 
friend. But he was now required to play a very 
different part. 

As soon as a man applied for parole, the parole 
officer betook himself to the place where the ap- 
plicant had formerly lived or been known, and 
there busied himself in unearthing whatever gossip 
and scandal of a hostile nature any enemy might 
be willing to supply. There was no time limit on 
these revelations, nor were any apparent precau- 



The Policy of Falsehood 261 

tions taken to determine whether the evil reports 
were founded in fact; the tale bearer was not com- 
pelled to testify under oath, and his story might 
refer to incidents which had happened years be- 
fore, and which had nothing to do with the crime 
for which the prisoner was now undergoing sen- 
tence. With this budget of information the parole 
officer returned to his superiors, who were now 
prepared for any contingency. 

When the prisoner comes up for examination, 
and has handed in his report of good conduct while 
incarcerated, the president of the board fixes a 
distrustful eye upon him, and says in effect, " Your 
behavior here seems to have been unobjectionable; 
but the board cannot take the responsibility of 
granting parole on that ground alone. It desires 
to be informed what you were doing in such and 
such a place, in such and such a year? Is it not 
true that you were arrested in this or that year 
for this or that offense? Has your career, in 
short, been absolutely blameless during the whole 
course of your life ? Because, unless you can prove 
such to be the case, it will indicate a predisposition 
to law-breaking on your part which will render it 
imprudent for the board to recommend you for 
parole to the Department." 

The president has a sheaf of papers in his hand, 
which he glances over significantly while the mind 
of the prisoner goes groping back over the past, 
asking himself what he has done amiss in forgotten 



262 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

years, and who can be his accusers. He has no 
counsel beside him to tell him that he is being tried 
before an unauthorized tribunal, on unsupported 
testimony, on charges irrelevant to that for which 
he is now undergoing punishment ; or to remind him 
that the judge who passed sentence on him had 
specified that if his behavior were good while serv- 
ing that sentence, he would be eligible for parole 
that he had, perhaps, given him a longer sen- 
tence than he would otherwise have done, upon 
this very understanding; and that, consequently, 
the parole board was now arrogating the power to 
override the purpose of the federal court, and to 
inflict additional and unwarranted punishment 
upon him for something which he may or may 
not have done in the past, or for which, if he had 
done it and been convicted, he may already have 
served sentence. He has no one to argue thus for 
him; he feels that he is alone and among enemies; 
and he can make no effective defense. And the 
parole officer stands by with a sad countenance, as 
of one who had done the best he could for a pro- 
tege, but was powerless to stem the tide of justice. 
It can't be done, legally or justly; but it is done; 
that is the gist of the matter. There is no one to 
know the wrong and to insist upon the right; and 
the wrong is perpetrated. Unnumbered victims 
of it, in every federal prison of the country, sub- 
stantiate this fact. The parole board which 
means, in practise, its president exercises more 



The Policy of Falsehood 263 

power than the federal court, and there is no ap- 
peal from his decision. At his will, a man may 
be tried twice for the same offense, behind closed 
doors, without aid of counsel. He may be con- 
demned, though the offense was never committed 
except in the imagination of an enemy. We tell 
our convicts that they have no civic rights; but it 
is not generally understood, I think, that the Span- 
ish Inquisition of the Middle Ages can properly 
be reproduced in Twentieth Century America even 
with men behind the bars. 

But let that pass. Things are done under the 
parole law worse than this. If it were used 
merely as a means to induce unruly men to be 
docile, no one could complain; if men thus induced 
should after all be deprived of the reward they 
had earned, we might condone it. But what if we 
find the parole board turned into an accessory of 
the secret service or spy system, and learn that 
an applicant for parole, whether or not he have 
maintained good conduct during his term, may yet 
hope for a favorable report on his case if he will 
consent to betray some man on whom the police 
have not yet been able to lay their hand? 

Here comes a postoffice thief, for example. He 
was known to have had confederates, but they 
escaped. He is up for parole, with only an indif- 
ferent prison record to plead for him. " We do 
not find your case meritorious/' says the president 
to him (in substance), "but there were two or 



264 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

three others concerned in your crime. If you are 
able to furnish their names to the board, with 
such other information as may lead to their arrest 
and conviction, we might see our way to recom- 
mend leniency in your matter." I will not guar- 
antee that the president expresses himself in terms 
quite so explicit, but he makes himself perfectly 
understood, and the prisoner perfectly understands 
that his liberty is purchasable at the price of treach- 
ery. 

I don't know what percentage of the miserable 
creatures accept the ignoble offer; but I know per- 
sonally of many who refused it. And I do not 
need to ask what are the prospects of an honest 
and worthy career for those who chose to be 
traitors. If they go to ruin, is not the parole 
board responsible ? On the other hand, who shall 
blame the convict if he accedes to the bargain? 
The alternative presented to him is one which 
might cause even virtue to waver, and convicts are 
not supposed to be virtuous, especially when such 
an example as this action of the board is set them. 
The alternative is liberty, or continued incarcera- 
tion with the strong probability of increased se- 
verity of treatment, and always the off chance of 
death. 

Meanwhile, is there not something humiliating 
in the reflection that a tribunal authorized and ap- 
pointed by the Government of the United States 
should descend to such practises? Or are we con- 



The Policy of Falsehood 265 

tent to accept the spy system in toto, cost what it 
may? Perhaps, however, the president of the 
parole board is prepared to deny that he ever en- 
tered into any such compact with a prisoner; and 
perhaps the Department of Justice will be aston- 
ished to hear that he ever did. Is the thing true, 
or not true? I think men exist who have excel- 
lent reasons to believe, and who may be willing to 
testify, that it is. 

But take the case of a prisoner who had no 
confederates how does the board deal with him ? 
According to my information, which includes my 
personal experience, question is put to the ap- 
plicant whether or not he admits himself guilty of 
the crime for which he is undergoing sentence? 
My own reply was, "Not guilty"; and though 
the president was very courteous to me, and gave 
me every assurance that I might expect favorable 
action on my application, as a matter of fact and 
of record the recommendation made to the Attor- 
ney-General was that my application be denied, and 
denied it accordingly was. But in other cases 
nearly contemporary with mine, which came to my 
knowledge, the reply of " not guilty " called forth 
the rejoinder that in that case the matter was not 
one for the board to pass on, but should be referred 
to executive action that is, that the President 
of the United States should be petitioned for a 
pardon. Some men are so persistent or so infatu- 
ated as to take the suggestion seriously; but their 



266 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

petition does not bear fruit; probably its path to 
the President is by way of the Department of Jus- 
tice, where it is either pigeonholed, or reaches him 
with an endorsement to the effect that it is not a 
case for clemency. But in such ca*es as came to 
my knowledge, the President never saw the petition 
at all. 

And what happens if our man pleads guilty? 
Why, in that event he is told that such a person 
as he should not have made application for parole 
that he has not been sufficiently punished that 
the best he should hope for is to serve out his sen- 
tence, less the regular allowance for good time. It 
is a case, in short, of heads the board wins, tails 
the convict loses; and he withdraws, wondering, 
perhaps, what the board is for. But let him be- 
ware of becoming restive under his disappointment, 
or he may forfeit his good time too. 

That the parole law is interpreted, under all 
conditions, as being a favor or privilege and not a 
right earned by good conduct, is perhaps no more 
than one might expect; but no prisoner who lacks 
powerful friends, or whose parole does not in some 
way inure to the advantage of the prison quite as 
much as to his own, can make his application with 
assured hope of success. Upon the whole, prison- 
ers feel that parole will not be granted if any 
means can be found or devised to prevent it; the 
good report of an entire county where a man for- 



The Policy of Falsehood 267 

merly lived will not prevail against the adverse 
report of some inspector one enemy of a pris- 
oner outweighs, in the board's estimation, the 
favorable words of many friends. 

Moreover, men released on parole live in con- 
stant dread of the secret service, for they know that 
unjust and trivial pretexts are often made the oc- 
casion of their re-arrest; and a paroled man re- 
arrested must serve out his whole time without 
rebate, and not including the period during which 
he was at liberty. Some supervision by the Gov- 
ernment is of course proper; but the men feel it 
to be hostile, not friendly or helpful; that any error 
they fall into or mishap they meet with will be 
construed against them, not in their favor. In 
short, under the outward forms of liberty, they are 
still in prison, and are often discouraged from do- 
ing their best by this sleepless fear of the prowling 
spy. 

Atlanta prison records show that out of one 
thousand prisoners who applied for parole up to 
June 30th, 1913, two hundred and seventy were 
successful. These applicants were serving terms 
of from one year and a day to twenty-one years. 
The two hundred and seventy who were paroled 
had served an aggregate of eighty-three years be- 
yond the period when they were eligible for pa- 
role (that is, after one-third of their original sen- 
tence), or an average of about 112 days each, 



268 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

and with an average of from twenty-five to forty 
per cent, of the time contemplated for them to re- 
establish and rehabilitate themselves. 

The one-year-one-day men lost about thirty- 
three per cent, of their time during which they 
might have labored to reform themselves; and 
there were about one hundred of the two hundred 
and seventy whose sentences ran for a year and a 
day. Some sixty-five of the two hundred and 
seventy had sentences of more than a year and 
a day and less than two years; about thirty-five 
had over two years and under three years; from 
which it would appear that short term men, con- 
victed of minor offenses, were given preference 
for parole over long term men. Yet it would 
seem to the ordinary intelligence that it should 
be the long term men who most needed parole and, 
if their conduct had been good, best deserved it. 
It often happened that men would be paroled when 
they had but a few weeks or even days yet to 
serve of their full sentence. In such cases, the 
prison got whatever credit may belong to grant- 
ing parole, but the men got rather less than noth- 
ing, for they stood the risk of re-arrest and further 
confinement. 

When an applicant goes before the board for ex- 
amination, he is sometimes turned down sum- 
marily; but more often he goes out ignorant 
whether or not he will succeed, and, as I have al- 
ready shown, he is not seldom kept in this tor- 



The Policy of Falsehood 269 

turing uncertainty until the day when he is either 
turned loose or told that he has been rejected. 
This seems unnecessary, and often appears to be 
due to sheer carelessness; the papers are not 
promptly submitted to the Attorney-General, or 
they are pigeonholed and forgotten. It may be 
true that the law does not categorically demand 
that a prisoner shall be released immediately upon 
a favorable report ; but there is no obvious reason 
why he should not be, and it is cruel to keep him 
in suspense. 

There was a young fellow while I was there, 
a well educated and agreeable man, whose con- 
duct had always been unexceptionable ; he applied 
when eligible for parole, and was informed that 
he would be released. Every morning thereafter 
for three weeks he arose with the hope that the 
release would come that day; every night he went 
to bed with a heart heavy with disappointment. 
He could not eat or sleep, he could not talk con- 
nectedly, he trembled and turned pale, and was on 
the way to becoming a nervous wreck; but no ex- 
planation was vouchsafed him. At last he was 
suddenly told that he might go. The sole reason 
that I ever heard for the delay was that the papers 
had been overlooked. There are a great many 
government employees at Washington ; it might be 
worth while to appoint one more, charged with the 
duty of seeing that the overlooking of parole pa- 
pers be henceforth avoided. This was a very 



270 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

mild instance; I have related how poor Dennis 
lingered for six months and finally died from the 
same inattention or indifference. 

There was a friend of mine, M., a highly in- 
telligent, good natured fellow, active and efficient 
in his prison duties, always courteous and obliging; 
he was serving a sentence of five years, I think, 
for some theft or confidence game. He had 
" done time " some six or seven years previously, 
but during the interval had lived straight. At the 
time of his last arrest he had been kept in the 
local jail, somewhere in New England, after con- 
viction, for four months before being transferred 
to Atlanta. Time spent in a local jail before con- 
viction is not counted in the prisoner's favor; for 
example, I was arrested several months before my 
conviction, and the trial itself lasted four months, 
and after the trial I spent ten days in the Tombs. 

With the exception of the last ten days, how- 
ever, I was lucky enough to be out on bail; but 
none of this time was applied to the lessening of 
my sojourn in Atlanta, although the judge specified 
in his sentence that my imprisonment there was 
to count from the time when the trial began; an 
injunction which, had it been observed, would have 
caused my release on parole a few days after my 
arrival at the penitentiary. But it appears that 
such rulings by a trial judge have no weight with 
the Department of Justice; and I am willing to 
admit that the judge's ruling in my case seemed 



The Policy of Falsehood 271 

rather like whipping the devil round the stump 
an evasion of the manifest intent of the law, 
which, if I were guilty, I had no right to expect. 
At all events, the Attorney-General made a de- 
cision, based upon my case, that hereafter no 
such evasions were to be allowed; and I presume 
his authority must be superior to that of any 
federal judge. 

But my friend's case did not come under this 
category. His four months in jail came after, not 
before, his conviction; and yet, when he arrived 
at Atlanta, he was told that this four months 
would not be deducted from his penitentiary time. 
Turn this which way you will, you cannot escape 
the conclusion that this man is getting four months 
more than the sentence of the judge required. 
Well, M. applied for parole on the plea of per- 
fect conduct during his imprisonment; no denial 
of that was offered; but he was informed that his 
conviction seven years before, for which he had 
been duly punished at that time, prevented the 
board from giving favorable attention to his ap- 
plication. 

This looks to me like trying a man twice for 
the same offense, and twice condemning him; and 
I can find nothing to warrant it in the wording 
of the parole law. If every actual or alleged mis- 
step of a man's whole life can be quoted against 
him as ground for refusing parole, it would seem 
tantamount to stultifying the law for parole. 



272 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

This is not done in every case; but the point is 
that it may be done in any case, and thus the fate 
of the applicant is at the arbitrary and^absolute 
disposal of the board, whether or not he have 
complied with the stated provisions of the law. 

The president of the parole board, in my time, 
was a Mr. Robert LaDow. A former deputy 
warden of the Leavenworth Penitentiary, one W. 
H. Mackay, wrote a letter.to the Attorney-General 
on the 6th of November, 1913, parts of which 
were published in newspapers about that time. In 
this letter he said that Mr. LaDow was egotistical, 
arrogant, negligent, extravagant, visionary and 
impractical, showed favoritism to prisoners, and 
was totally unfit for the position he held. He 
goes on as follows: 

" Personally, he knows nothing of Leaven- 
worth Federal Prison; he is too cowardly to go 
among the prisoners in the yards to make a per- 
sonal investigation of conditions; he has dealt un- 
fairly and hastily with so many at the parole meet- 
ings that he is afraid to meet prisoners face to 
face. . . . Prisoners will stand punishment with- 
out a murmur if there is a just reason for it, and 
they will permit you to be the judge; but when 
men under the law are entitled to parole, and the 
flimsy excuse to hold them in confinement is made 
that they will be a menace to society, they cannot 
se* H in that way. The parole board at this time 



The Policy of Falsehood 273 

is arrogantly dominated by LaDow; it is prac- 
tically a one-man board. . . . 

" When the board meets here, the men do not 
know sometimes for weeks and months afterwards 
what their fate is. ... Instances occur here 
where the board acts unanimously upon a parole. 
Mr. LaDow takes these cases to Washington and 
holds them thirty, sixty, and even ninety days on 
some flimsy pretext or other. He often claims 
press of business, until finally some senator or 
congressman or influential politician calls on him, 
and then he gets busy very suddenly. . . . 

" When he comes to a parole meeting he begins 
work generally with a rush and a flurry. . . . 
Usually has about 180 cases; he rushes them at the 
rate of 60 to 80 a day, without getting at the 
merits or giving them serious deliberation. He 
brings a stenographer, his private secretary, from 
Washington at a heavy expense. . . . Then, 
when they return to Washington, the stenog- 
rapher writes up the result of the meeting, while 
LaDow will take a junketing trip at Government 
expense ... as a sort of recreation from his 
arduous duties." 

I had not been long in Atlanta before a guard 
informed me that LaDow was the best hated man 
in the prison, by officials and convicts alike. Nor 
did I find any prisoner there, afterward, who did 
not speak to the same tune. If he be really an 



274 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

efficient and trustworthy official, this is singular 
and unfortunate. Mr. Mackay's charges against 
him at Leavenworth are almost identically the 
same as what may be heard against him any day 
in Atlanta. If there be any basis for them, per- 
haps it would be expedient for the Government to 
supersede him. The parole law, at its best, seems 
to be rather a weak-kneed and perverse institution, 
and it would be a pity to deprive it of what value 
it may have by committing its dispensation to the 
hands of a man not peculiarly fitted by nature and 
temperament to carry out its provisions. It was 
Napoleon's opinion that a blunder is worse than 
a crime. 



XV 
THE FRUIT OF PRISONS 

AFTER weathering Cape Parole, I laid my 
course for the Port of Good Time. Men 
whose prison records are clear are liberated after 
serving two-thirds of their original sentences. 
This new posture of my mind invited a review 
of the experience through which I had been pass- 
ing, and of the conditions with which I had be- 
come conversant, and their significance in connec- 
tion with the policy of penal imprisonment in 
general. I will introduce some of these reflec- 
tions in this place. 

As I have just said, men whose prison records 
are clear are liberated after serving two-thirds of 
their original sentences. But part or all of this 
abridgment may be lost by imperfect conduct. 
One man, at least, within my knowledge, was 
punished by the dark hole several months before 
the expiration of his original sentence, and was 
kept there until that sentence had expired. Then, 
out of that filthy dungeon he was thrust abruptly 
forth into broad daylight and the crowded world. 
It was a miracle if he survived. What have most 
convicts t o live for? Perhaps those who have 

275 



276 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

most to live for are unlikeliest to survive their 
anxiety is greater. 

On the other hand, severity itself may stimu- 
late a convict. His human mind cannot compre- 
hend despair. Instinct forces him to hope. So 
weeks, months, years go by, and hope seems to 
him more instead of less justifiable, till at last, 
perhaps, he dies with the illusion still strong in 
him. Real despair is un-human and possibly rare. 
Otherwise prison mutinies and killings would be 
more frequent. The argument of despair is, 
" Since I must die here anyway, I'll take two or 
three of those devils with me ! " But few men 
believe they will die in jail, therefore the guard 
or other official escapes. 

Not ten per cent, of men in jail would regard 
such a killing as unjustifiable. We were taught in 
school that resistance to tyrants is obedience to 
God, and many who had disobeyed God in other 
ways would gladly obey Him in this. I speak not 
merely of u ignorant and brutal " convicts, but 
of educated and intelligent men like you and me. 
Even a sensitive conscience may condone the kill- 
ing of a tyrant who is slowly and surely destroy- 
ing you, body and soul, under sanction of law. 
But we punish convicts who fight for revenge or 
liberty, and protect the officials who taunt and tor- 
ture them into doing it. 

What a hideous and almost unbelievable situa- 
tion! Historians wonder that the Aztecs of 



The Fruit of Prisons 277 

Cortez 1 time, with their comparatively high 
civilization, tolerated human sacrifices. But their 
human sacrifices were merciful compared with 
ours. What is cutting out a man's heart on an 
altar to propitiate a god, to hounding him to death 
through miserable years in a prison to placate the 
spite of an accuser, the justice of a court, or the 
grudge of a warden or guard? 

And what is the fruit of it? For pure, care- 
free, smiling, remorseless wickedness nothing in 
human annals surpasses the young criminals 
blackmailers, bomb-throwers, gunmen now in- 
festing our cities. " I think no more of killing a 
houseful of human beings, men, women and chil- 
dren," one of them was quoted as saying the other 
day, " than of crushing so many beetles." How 
came such a monster to exist? Why, we bred 
him, supplied him with the poisonous conditions 
that generate such beings and can generate noth- 
ing else. He had intelligence enough to under- 
stand that the established order made earning an 
honest living hard work; saw thousands living well 
without labor apparently, other thousands robbing 
under cover of legal technicalities; a legal pro- 
fession living by devising statutes to punish 
crimes and prosecuting the criminals thus manu- 
factured ; often living better yet by teaching crimi- 
nals to escape the penalties which their law im- 
posed. He saw reform schools which instructed 
such children as he had been to become such men 



278 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

as he was; prisons and penitentiaries which gradu- 
ated such as he in the latest devices of crime 
and he made up his mind that goodness was at 
bottom humbug, that only a fool would be honest 
or merciful when money could be got by theft and 
murder. 

We breed poisonous snakes and scorpions, give 
them no chance to be anything but that, and then 
wonder they are not doves and butterflies. Things 
like this gangster are infernal spirits, irreclaima- 
ble; but we gain nothing by extirpating the indi- 
viduals; the black stream which carries them must 
be dammed at its source. Of the conditions which 
generate them, a part is the prisons and their 
keepers. But we are not yet at the root of the 
matter the keepers are not primarily to blame. 
It is the principle which prisons illustrate which 
attracts and molds keepers till they become often 
as bad as the men they have charge of, and often 
much worse. 

Prisons mean social selfishness, the disowning of 
our own flesh and blood. They segregate visible 
consequences of social disease; but the disease is 
invisibly present in all parts of the body corporate, 
and can no more be healed by cutting off the visible 
part than we can heal small pox by cutting out the 
pustules. Prisons are not the right remedy; they 
inflame and disseminate the poison we would be 
rid of and prevent any chance of cure. The soul 
of all crime is self-seeking in place of neighborly 



The Fruit of Prisons 279 

good will; we send men to prison to get them out 
of our way, and that is criminal self seeking and 
ill will to the neighbor -> delegating to hirelings 
our own proper business. 

In attempting thus selfishly to extirpate crime, 
we commit the crime least of all forgivable the 
denial of human brotherhood and responsibility. 
For that crime, no law sends us to prison; yet it is 
no sentimental notion, but the truth, that it is a 
crime worse than those for which we imprison 
men. Prisons are brimful of men less guilty be- 
fore God than is the society that condemned them. 
You and I are not excused because we are not 
society we are society. Society is not numbers 
but an idea a mutual relation; we cannot shift 
our blame to people in the next street. " Am I 
my brother's keeper? " was an argument used 
long ago, and its reception was not encouraging. 

Thoughts like these pass through a convict's 
mind when he discovers that he is on the last leg 
of his disastrous voyage. He then begins to see 
the whole matter in its general relations; what 
use was served? who is the better for it? 
" Prisons make a good man bad and a bad man 
worse,'' is the way I often heard the men at At- 
lanta put it. The situation, entire and in detail, 
is preposterous and futile. Grown men, from 
all ranks of life, or all degrees of intelligence and 
education, are herded promiscuously, and treated 
now like wild beasts, now like children. Dis- 



280 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

cipline, in any condition of life, is a good thing, 
and no people need discipline more than we do; 
but in prison, discipline means punishment, and 
there is no discipline in the right sense of the word. 
A man is " disciplined " when he is starved, or 
clubbed, or put in the hole, or deprived of his 
good time. 

Military discipline might be beneficial; it im- 
plies respect for rightful authority, and orderly 
conduct of one's own life. Officials in a peniten- 
tiary wear uniforms ; prisoners wear prison clothes ; 
but, in warm weather, officials go about, indoors 
and out, in their shirts and with the bearing of 
loafers; they have no official salutes, and the men 
are not allowed to salute them to do so would 
expose them to " discipline." There is no drill 
in the prison, no soldierly bearing, no physical 
control of movement. The men are " lined up " 
to go to work, but it is a line of slouchers and 
derelicts; no spirit in it, no respect for themselves 
or one another, no decent example set by the 
guards. And yet armies in all ages and in all 
parts of the world have proved the value of dis- 
cipline its necessity, indeed in all proper and 
intelligent handling and control of bodies of men; 
and it is as important for convicts as for soldiers. 
It would promote cheerfulness, smartness, effi- 
ciency; half an hour's lively drill of all the men 
in prison every morning and evening would do 
them good, improve relations between guards and 



The Fruit of Prisons 281 

prisoners, and lessen the danger of revolts. Why 
refuse it then? Is it because it would imply 
something human still lingering in convicts? or 
because it is feared that convicts taught to act 
in unison by military drill would combine more 
readily for mutiny? But order does not naturally 
lead to disorder but away from it, and mutinies 
are mostly impromptu affairs, contemplating re- 
venge rather than escape. As for the other argu- 
ment, a lie is not a sound basis to build on, and it 
is a lie that convicts are not human. To admit 
this would facilitate their management. 

Physical exercise twice a day in the open air 
would diminish the sick line, produce better work, 
and help to put a soul in any prison. Desultory 
exercise say two or three hours of baseball on 
Saturdays does not meet the need it em- 
phasizes it rather. But at present the well-nigh 
universal aim seems to be to render the gray 
monotony of prison slavery as monotonous and 
as gray as possible. Any relief from it is op- 
posed or made difficult. It is true that at Atlanta 
and elsewhere we have music (that is what it is 
called, and I have no wish to criticize the hard- 
working and zealous young fellows who produce 
it in and out of season; and some of the men may 
like it for aught I know) ; and that a vaudeville 
company performs for us occasionally. But I must 
look these gift horses in the mouth, and say that 
often we have them less for our own advantage 



282 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

than as an advertisement to the public of the 
liberality of prison authorities. And there to be 
sure at my prison, is Uncle Billy, who makes 
fiddles out of shingles, with nails, and plays on 
them, all with one hand. But he is I hope I 
may now say, he was; for he was to have been 
paroled the other day; he was a lifer, and a pic- 
turesque and wholly innocuous figure he was, 
then, permitted to pursue this industry, and vis- 
itors used to come and watch him do it; but he, 
too, was most useful to the prison press agent, and 
owed the indulgence to that functionary. On the 
other hand, there is a convict, also a lifer, who 
cultivated a most remarkable skill in inlaid wood- 
work, producing really beautiful and artistic boxes 
and other articles, and found some consolation for 
his awful fate in making them. But one day while 
I was there his cell was entered by the guard, his 
boxes and plant taken away and broken, and he 
was forbidden to do that work any more. Vis- 
itors did not know about him. 

This was malicious. But some of the things 
done by prison authorities are apparently due to 
sheer stupidity and ignorance. For example, 
there were some cows belonging to Atlanta prison, 
and some of them calved. So there were half a 
dozen calves more or less, with prospects of more 
to come. The authorities decided that the ex- 
pense of rearing these innocents was not justifia- 
ble; there was nothing in the rule book about it; 



The Fruit of Prisons 283 

besides, the jail was not designed to harbor inno- 
cent creatures. The minutes of the conference 
were not given out, and we can judge of what 
passed only by the results. The order went forth 
that the calves be killed; and the killing was act- 
ually perpetrated, and the bodies were buried 
somewhere in the prison grounds. The story 
seems incredible, but it was corroborated by sev- 
eral men cognizant of the facts. Why not, at 
least, have turned them into veal? 

I was speaking just now of the promiscuous 
herding together of prisoners in prisons generally. 
No effort is made to separate the old from the 
young, the educated from the ignorant; the 
hardened sinners from the impressionable youths 
or newcomers; or (at Atlanta, except in the cells) , 
the negroes from the whites. Association of ne- 
groes with whites, on a footing of enforced out- 
ward equality, is bad for both; not because a bad 
white man is worse than a bad negro, but be- 
cause the physical, mental and moral qualities of 
either react unfavorably upon the other. The 
negro, being the more ignorant as a rule, falls 
more readily into degraded vices; the white man, 
being as a rule the dominant element in the situa- 
tion, masters the will of the negro, but cannot or at 
least does not erect barriers against the latter's 
subtle corruption. 

We must always bear in mind the abnormal 
conditions in a prison the misery of it, the 



284 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

dearth of variety and relaxation, the terrible 
yearning for some form, any form, of distraction 
and amusement. The male is parted from the 
female, and from the resource of children; his 
nerves are on edge, his natural propensities 
starved, his thoughts wandering and embittered; 
he finds no good anywhere, nor any hope of it. 
He will seize upon any means of abating or dull- 
ing his cravings. The negro is pliant, unmoral, 
free from the restraints of white civilization. In 
the South especially, his subordination to the white 
is almost a second nature; but he involuntarily 
avenges himself (as all lower races do upon the 
stronger) by that readiness to comply which flat- 
ters the sense of power and superiority in the other, 
and leads to evil. 

I wish to say, in passing, that my allusion to 
negroes in this connection is by no means to be 
taken as reflecting upon them all; some of the men 
in Atlanta for whom I had the highest respect 
were negroes; and I am inclined to think that the 
negro in his right place and function is a desirable 
element in civilization, and, if we would treat 
him aright, would do us as much good as we can 
do him. Eut the negro in jail is at his worst, 
just as white men are, and he is made worse by 
white companionship. There are more than two 
hundred of them in Atlanta jail, and some of them 
are the worst of their kind. 

What is true of the association of negroes with 



The Fruit of Prisons 285 

whites is not less true of the association of what 
are called professional criminals with the young 
and unhardened. Various prison authorities 
claim that they have made some effort to prevent 
this contamination; but the only sign of it that I 
could ever discover at Atlanta was that the old and 
the young are not commonly assigned to the same 
cells. Obviously, however, a man young in years 
may be old in crime; there can be no security in 
the age test taken by itself; and no pretense of 
adopting any other test in a jail is made. 

A young fellow, without inherited or acquired 
criminal tendencies, is sent to jail for some inad- 
vertent and insignificant infraction of law. He 
had always meant to live straight; he had no 
enmity against society; he had always thought of 
himself as well intentioned and law abiding. But 
here he is; and he is shocked, shamed and ap- 
palled at the sudden grip and horror of the jail. 
Upon a mind thus astounded and distraught the 
professional criminal seizes and works. 

The man of the world of the criminal world 
befriends him, chats with him, heartens him, 
and soon begins to fascinate him with ideas 
which had never till now occurred to him. He 
preaches the injustice and hostility of all mankind, 
and the hopelessness of the convict once in jail 
ever again reestablishing himself in the world. 
He tells his pupil that he is damned forever by his 
fellow men outside, and that unless he be pre- 



286 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

pared to lie down and starve, he must fight for 
life in the only way open to him the way of 
crime. Then he proceeds to show him, progres- 
sively, the profits and advantages of criminal prac- 
tises. It is only too easy for the trained crook 
to overcome the resistance of the unhardened 
youth; his arguments seem unanswerable; and the 
wholly justifiable feeling that prison is wrong and 
an outrage aids the corruptor at every turn. A 
few months is often enough to turn an innocent 
boy into a malefactor; a year or more of such in- 
struction leaves him no chance of escape ; and many 
an innocent boy finds himself in a cell for what 
seems to him a lifetime. 

Last July, a justice of a State Supreme Court 
sentenced Thomas Baker, little more than a child, 
to fifteen years in jail for what? If your 
mother was blind and helpless, and your stepfather 
came in and abused her and beat her, in your 
presence, a big brute with whom you could not 
hope to contend physically, what would be your 
feelings, and what would you be prompted to do ? 
Thomas Baker, trembling and sobbing with rage 
and anguish, ran out of the house to a neighbor's, 
borrowed a shotgun, and ran back and emptied it 
into the brute's body, killing him on the spot. 
Fifteen years in prison for that! Shall we rejoice 
and say that justice, at last, is satisfied? But 
that is a digression. 

No doubt, meanwhile, Thomas Baker's one con- 



The Fruit of Prisons 287 

solation in life is the reflection that he did succeed 
in killing his stepfather; and he will be very ready 
to give ear to an older and more experienced man 
who tells him that the only difference between 
good and bad in the world is that those are called 
good who have power over those who are called 
bad; and that the only way for him to get even 
for his wrongs is to become a crook and not be 
a fool! 

The wardens and guards do not prevent these 
companionships; whether or not they try to pre- 
vent them cannot be affirmed; but to my mind it 
is plain that they could not prevent it, try as they 
might It is an evil inherent in prisons and inerad- 
icable. As long as we have prisons, we shall see 
judges like Thomas Baker's sending boys to jail 
for such " crimes " as his, there to stay for fifteen 
years, more or less, and there to be changed from 
innocence into diabolism. But Thomas was not 
innocent, you say, but guilty. What is guilt? I 
find him innocent of the guilt of standing inactive 
by and seeing that cruel fist strike his blind 
mother's beloved face. 

Anything unnatural seems unreal. I remarked 
some time ago that when I was sitting in the court 
room being tried on charges sworn to by certain 
postoffice officials, the dull and sordid scenes would 
sometimes vanish before me, and I would say to 
myself, * It is an illusion what is really taking 
place is very different from this appearance." 



288 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

This thought often recurred while I was in prison. 

At meal times, the men would file in. and take 
their places at the tables; anon, the meal over, 
they would rise and file out men whom I knew, 
creatures like myself, slaves of an arbitrary power 
acting in accordance with principles long since 
known to be false and mischievous. And I would 
see men whom I knew, men like myself, jeered, in- 
sulted, clubbed, dragged to the hole. I would see 
the dead bodies of men whom I knew, men like 
myself, rattled out of the gate to the dumping 
ground and dropped there and forgotten men 
with wives and children still living or dead in 
poverty and shame, their pleas unheard and their 
wrongs unrighted. I would contemplate the long 
rows of steel cells, cages for me and men like my- 
self, locking us in for months and years and life- 
times, for an example to others and for the pro- 
tection of society against our menace. I would 
glance, as I passed, at the aimless toilers in the 
workshops, standing or squatting in the foul at- 
mosphere under the eye and rifle of the guard. 

I would consider that this dismal and inhuman 
pageant was going on age after age as a cure for 
crime while crime, all the while, was increasing 
by percentages so astounding that we seek through 
immigration statistics and records of increase of 
population to account for it and in vain. And 
I would tell myself, once more, that the thing must 



The Fruit of Prisons 289 

be an illusion; it was inconceivable that an intel- 
ligent nation should tolerate it. 

If you found that you were taking bichlorid of 
mercury by mistake for a sleeping draught, would 
you go on taking it? or would you clamor for 
an antidote, waylay doctors for help, and disturb 
the discreet serenity of hospitals for succor? But 
the nation, made up of such as you, continues its 
prison nostrum, which slays a million for bichlo- 
rid of mercury's one. 

A tragic farce that is what prisons are. En- 
closures of stone and steel are built, and a handful 
of armed men are given absolute control over 
several hundred beings like themselves. We, as 
a community, have erected a system of laws which 
places us, as a community, in the attitude of penal- 
izing practises which we, as individuals, do not 
severely condemn. Our morality, as publicly pro- 
fessed, is in advance of our morals as privately 
exercised. When our neighbor steals or murders, 
we give him the jail or the chair; but when you 
and I are charged with such deeds and see the 
prison or the chair in our near foreground, we 
discover ourselves to be less convinced than we 
had imagined of the rectitude of our penal sys- 
tem. Of course, then, the faster we make laws 
to punish crime, and the more we punish criminals, 
the more criminals are there to punish. Our 
hypocrisy gradually is revenged upon us, one after 



290 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

another; one by one we fall into the pit so vir- 
tuously digged for others. 

And criminal law, meanwhile, becomes con- 
stantly more searching and severe in its provisions, 
seeking to prevent crime by the singular device of 
employing the best methods for multiplying it. 
The victims of its activities are miserable enough 
in jail, and languish and die there, and, if they 
were not very wicked before, are furnished with 
every facility to become so ; but they have not the 
consolation of feeling that their being thus im- 
molated on the altar of an outraged but non-exist- 
ent morality is doing them or anybody else any 
good. A prominent business man was put in a 
cell yesterday; a political boss arrives to-day; a 
college graduate, a judge, and a religious fanatic 
are expected next week. But business, politics, the 
Four Hundred, the Law and religion are no better 
than they were before. 

The procession becomes ever more crowded; 
when is it to stop ? Shall we build more prisons, 
enact more laws? A leading counsel said the 
other day, " Commercial crime is an effect and not 
a cause. The existing system is responsible. We 
should prevent conditions that lead to crime and 
resort to criminal courts as little as possible." 
And an ex-Attorney-General observed, about the 
same time, " I sometimes think that if we could 
repeal all the laws on our statute books and then 
write two laws * Fear God ' and * Love your 



The Fruit of Prisons 291 

neighbor '- we would get along better " but he 
added, " If we could get the people to live up to 
them ! " Yes, that is a prudent stipulation ; and 
it applies just as well to the myriad " laws on our 
statute books " as to these two. 

I call prisons a tragic farce, and am sensible of 
an unreality in them ; but they are fortunately un- 
real only in the sense that they stand for nothing 
rational or in line with the proper and natural 
processes of human life. They are false, and the 
mind spontaneously reacts against falsity and de- 
nies it. But here are half a million (or some say, 
a million) men every year who suffer actual and 
real misery from this falsity, and many of whom 
die of it; that is the tragedy of the farce. And 
the fact that this falsity, prison, exists among us 
and has legal standing and warrant, tends to de- 
moralize every one connected with it, and, more or 
less, the entire community. If its misery and evil 
were confined within the circuit of its walls we 
might endure it; but it spreads outward like a 
pestilence. It creates little jails in our minds and 
hearts, though we never beheld the substantial 
walls nor heard the steel gates clang together. 
We become jailers to one another, and to our- 
selves. 

There was a woman, the wife of a jailer, with a 
son four years old. At first, her husband had 
lived in a house outside the jail, but latterly he 
had been obliged to dwell within the jail walls. 



292 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

His wife had seen and known too much of jails 
to be happy in such a residence. She 'thought of 
her son, growing up inside prison walls, and seeing 
the squalor and daily misery of convicts, and wit- 
nessing the cruelties of the guards mere matters 
of routine, but horrible nevertheless. Her hus- 
band had come up from the ranks in prison life, 
and was an efficient officer. He had no thought 
of ever changing his occupation. 

One day he left the jail on business, and did not 
return till one o'clock the next morning. Two 
keepers who had been left in charge heard four 
sounds like pistol shots about ten o'clock that night, 
but supposed them to be torpedoes exploding on the 
railroad that passed the rear of the jail. There 
was an interval of an hour or so, and then came two 
more shots. This time they made a search of the 
jail, but it did not occur to them to examine the 
quarters of the warden, where his wife and his 
little son were. 

When the husband and father reached home, 
he went to his rooms; and there he learned the 
extent of the misery and loathing which his profes- 
sion and his dwelling had created in the heart of 
the woman who had loved him. She lay dead, 
with a bullet hole in her temple. The little boy 
was also dead, shot through the heart by his 
mother's hand. On the floor was the pistol, and 
four empty shells were scattered about. Those 
first bullets she must have aimed at her son, but 



The Fruit of Prisons 293 

the horror of the situation had shaken her hand, 
and she had missed him. Then had come that 
interval, which the two keepers had noticed. 
What had been in her mind and heart during those 
endless, brief minutes her terrors, her mem- 
ories, her desperate resolve, now failing, now 
again renewed? If you who read this are a 
mother, you may perhaps imagine the unspeakable 
drama of that hour. At last, murder and suicide 
were better than the jail, and she fired twice again, 
and this time did not miss. 

" Insane " was the verdict. But it is perhaps 
reasonable to ascribe the insanity to the conditions 
which found their black fruition in the woman's 
act, rather than to the despairing creature herself. 
She had all that most women would ask for happi- 
ness a good husband, a darling little son, an 
assured support. But there was ever before her 
eyes the ghastly, inhuman spectacle and burden of 
the jail; she knew it through and through, and 
she could endure it no longer. She pictured her 
innocent boy growing up and following his father's 
trade. The idea tortured her beyond the limits 
of her strength, and she accepted the only alterna- 
tive death. She was not a prisoner she was 
only a looker on; but that is what prison did for 
her. And our press, echoing our own will, and 
our courts, voicing our own laws, keeps on shout- 
ing, "Put the crooks in stripes; show them no 
mercy! " 



294 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

Shall we not pause a moment over the bodies of 
this mother and her son, over this frenzied murder 
and suicide? They constitute an arraignment of 
the prison principle not to be lightly passed over, 
or commented on with rasping irony by witty edi- 
torial writers. That tragedy means something. 
We cannot lease the community's real estate to 
hell, for building hell houses and carrying on hell 
business, supported by our taxes and advocated by 
our courts and praised (or " reformed ") by our 
penologists we cannot do that without meeting 
the consequences. We see how the consequences 
affected Mrs. Schleth in the Queens County, New 
York, jail, last summer. It will affect other per- 
sons in other ways. But it will affect us all before 
we are done with it. Hell on earth is a tenant 
which no community can suffer with impunity. 

If prisons are a good thing, it is full time they 
made good. If they are a bad thing, it is full time 
they were abolished. The middle courses now be- 
ing tried in some places cannot succeed; no com- 
promise with hell ever succeeds, however kindly 
intentioned. But the devil rejoices in them, recog- 
nizing his subtlest work done to his hand. 

What shall happen if prisons are done away 
with? That question will doubtless puzzle us for 
a long time to come. I have no infallible remedy; 
but I shall touch upon the subject in my next and 
last chapter. 



XVI 

IF NOT PRISONS WHAT? 

WHAT would you advise to check law break- 
ing? A good practical answer to that 
question would save civilized humanity a great 
many millions of dollars every year. 

The old answer was " jail " for minor cases 
and death for the others. There was much to 
be urged in favor of the latter. Dead men not 
only tell no tales, but they commit no crimes. Kill 
all criminals and crime would cease. The device 
has been tried it was tried in England for a 
while but the result was disappointing. It 
threatened to decimate the population; and in 
spite of logic, it failed to discourage law breakers. 
Criminals seemed to get used to being hanged, and 
drawn and quartered they no longer minded 
it. There is a psychological reason for that, no 
doubt; though it is not so sure that psychology as 
understood and practised to-day can find out what 
it is. 

Moreover, the spy system, which always ac- 
companies and thrives upon severe legislation, be- 
came so productive of informations that it was 
soon clear that the end would be the indictment 

295 



296 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

not so much of a tenth part of the population as 
of all but a tenth or even more. So a compro- 
mise was made; only murderers should be killed. 
That did not lessen the number of murders, and 
seems rather to have increased them; for the im- 
pulse to murder is commonly a very strong im- 
pulse, producing a brain condition in which conse- 
quences are not weighed. Also, when the com- 
munity takes life for life, it appears to weaken the 
general respect for life, and men can be hired to 
do a killing job for small sums. Sentimental per- 
sons, too, insist on making heroes of convicted 
murderers, which in a degree, perhaps, counter- 
acts the depressing conditions surrounding them. 
So we made another compromise. 

This is not on the statute books, but it operates 
actively, nevertheless. It is the development of 
the appeal industry among lawyers for the defense. 

" I will teach you to respect human life," says 
the judge, " by depriving you of your own." 

" Don't worry, my boy," says the culprit's coun- 
sel, patting him on the back; "you'll die some- 
time, I suppose ; but nothing is more certain than 
that it won't be on the day set for your execution 
by his honor. And I'll risk my reputation on 
your death being no less in the ordinary course of 
nature than his honor's, and very likely for he 
looks like a diabetes patient not so soon." 

These anticipations often prove well grounded. 



If Not Prisons What? 297 

No one in the court room, therefore, is often more 
cheerful and confident than is the prisoner doomed 
to the noose or the chair. Besides, if all else 
fails, he may petition for pardon or for life im- 
prisonment. 

In short, the death penalty stays on the statute 
books, but the community does not want it, though 
it has not the courage to demand its abolition out- 
right. It forfeits its self-respect, and the mur- 
derer draws the inference that it is safer to murder 
than to steal. A thoroughbred man does not com- 
promise; he does one thing or he does the other, 
retains his self-respect, and commands that of his 
fellows, whether or not he be " successful." This 
nation is not thoroughbred as regards its laws, and 
is neither self-respecting nor respected. 

However, there is agitation for the abolition of 
the death penalty; and possibly the futility and 
absurdity of such a punishment may finally strike 
the persons whom we have picked out as the wisest 
and ablest among us, and have put in our legis- 
latures to tell us what to do and not to do. 
Absurd though legal killings may be, they are not 
so absurd as the persuasion that death is the worst 
thing that can happen to a man. It involves little 
or no suffering, and is over in a moment. Impris- 
onment involves much suffering, and lasts long, 
not to speak of the disgrace of it, to those who can 
feel disgrace. The serious feature about killing 



298 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

is, that it is final for this state of being, and when 
we do it we do we know not what. But-that is for 
the community to consider, not the victim. 

We cannot know what death means, but we can 
and do know what imprisonment means, and so far 
as our mortal senses can tell us, it is worse than 
death. But while we may abolish the death pen- 
alty easily, the suggestion to abolish imprisonment 
staggers us like an earthquake. Every moral in- 
stinct in our little souls leaps up and shrieks in 
protest; and if that be not enough, we fall back 
with full conviction upon the consideration of se- 
curity of property. It is impossible to consider 
a measure which would leave crimes against prop- 
erty unpunished. And what other punishment for 
them than imprisonment is there or can there be ? 

Argument upon this matter evidently bids fair 
to drag in pretty nearly everything else sociol- 
ogy, political economy, religion, politics, law, 
medicine, psychology, the whole conduct of our 
life and history of our opinions. But I must con- 
tent myself here with a few words, and leave vol- 
umes to others. That personal property has 
value is undeniable; whether it be worth what it 
costs us, in the long run, and from all points of 
view, may be left to the judgment of generations 
to come. Law in its origins is Divine; whether 
our human derivations from it partake of its high 
nature is debatable. Medicine and psychology, 
professing much, have not explained to us what 



If Not Prisons What? 299 

or why we are, or what is our degree of responsi- 
bility for what we are and do. Politics sits on 
the bench and argues through the mouth of the 
public prosecutor; is justice safe in their keeping? 

This age did not invent prisons, but inherited 
them from an unmeasured past. It is a primitive 
device. The mother locks up her naughty child in 
the closet or ties its leg to the bed-post. Society 
does the same with its naughty children, though 
with one difference the mother still loves her 
child. She, following the example of God, chast- 
ens in love; but what do we chasten in? If not in 
love, then in hate or indifference, or to get trouble- 
some persons out of our way without regard to 
harm or benefit to them. And that is not Godlike 
but diabolical, being based upon selfishness. The 
community being stronger than the individual, its 
selfishness is tyranny or despotism. Many of us 
indeed may be willing to admit that prisons are 
perhaps objectionable or altogether wrong in 
theory; but surely something must be done with 
malefactors, and if not prison, what? 

The only answer hitherto is compromise the 
old answer, fresh once more from the devil's in- 
exhaustible repertoire. We are willing to abolish 
the death penalty, which is more merciful than im- 
prisonment; but we are unwilling to abolish the 
latter, because in spite of its inhumanity, it seems 
to protect our property. In other words, we con- 
sider our own interests exclusively, and the culprit's 



300 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

not at all though we still protest that our object 
in imprisoning is as much the individual's reforma- 
tion, as our own security. The fact, however, that 
imprisonment brutifies and destroys instead of re- 
forming is beginning to glare at us in a manner so 
disconcerting and undeniable, that we feel some- 
thing has to be done ; and in accordance with our 
ancient habit and constitutional predisposition, that 
something turns out to be compromise. We sen- 
tenced for murder, but put obstacles in the way of 
carrying the sentence out. On the same principle, 
we will now retain prisons, but make them so agree- 
able that convicts will not mind being committed 
to them. 

That is the compromise; and it is already in 
operation here and there. In the first place, num- 
bers of good men and women, with motives either 
religious or humanitarian or both, obtained leave 
to visit prisons, talk with the inmates, give them 
religious exhortations, supply them with some 
forms of entertainment, and in other ways try to 
lighten the burden of their penal slavery. These 
persons deserve great credit. It was not so much 
the exhortations or entertainments that did good, 
as the idea thereby aroused in convicts that some- 
body cared for them. Between them and the 
community there was still war to the knife; but 
certain individuals, separate from the community, 
were not hostile but well disposed toward them. 

A man fallen into evil may sometimes be re- 



If Not Prisons What? 301 

deemed by coming to feel this; he will try to be 
good for the sake of the person who was kind to 
him in his misery. I once asked a comrade in 
Atlanta whether if the warden were to give him 
twenty dollars and tell him to go to the town, 
make a purchase for him, and return, he would do 
so? He said, "No," and when I asked him 
why, replied that he would know the warden had 
something up his sleeve, and was not on the square 
in his proposition. I then named a certain bene- 
factor of the prisoners outside the prison, and 
asked if he would do it for that person? After 
some consideration, he said that he would, because 
he " would hate to disappoint " that person, and 
would believe in the bona fides of that person's re- 
quest. This man was held to be rather a bad 
case ; but he was still capable of acting honorably, 
if the right motives were supplied. 

But this is not enough. The great mass of con- 
victs could not be reformed by " hating to dis- 
appoint " any particular person who had been kind 
to them or trusted them. Their personal grati- 
tude to the individual would not stem the tide of 
their well grounded conviction that people in gen- 
eral were neither trustful nor kind; and the num- 
berless and constant temptations of their life after 
liberation would prove too strong for them. 
There have been instances to the contrary; touch- 
ing and beautiful instances, some of them; but they 
are far from establishing the principle that Chris- 



302 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

tian Endeavorers, or Salvation Armies, or prison 
angels, or angelic wardens can effect the 'reform of 
men in prison. Some stimulus much more power- 
ful is required. 

The next step in compromise was to improve the 
physical conditions in the prison ; to give more light 
and air and exercise, better food; to mitigate or do 
away with dark holes, assaults and tortures. 
There were many zealous critics of these lenien- 
cies; they said we were making prisons so attrac- 
tive that criminals, so far from being deterred from 
crime by fear of punishment, would commit crimes 
in order to be sent to prison. And they could 
quote in confirmation cases of men who had ac- 
cepted liberation at the end of their terms re- 
luctantly, or had actually refused it, or of men who 
had voluntarily returned to prison after having 
been discharged. 

There have been such cases ; but they prove, not 
the attractiveness of prisons, but their power to 
kill the manhood in a man. What does it not sug- 
gest of outrage and degradation perpetrated upon 
a human soul, that he should come to prefer a cell 
and a master to freedom ! There may be slaveries 
so soft as to invite the base and pusillanimous, but 
they are more rather than less depraving than 
cruelties to all that makes honorable and useful 
manhood. The deepest and essential evil of pris- 
ons is not hardship and torture, but imprisonment. 
If choice could be made between the two, every 



If Not Prisons What? 303 

manly man would choose the former. No dis- 
grace is inherent in hardship and torture; but im- 
prisonment brands a man as unfit to associate with 
his kind. No mortal creature has or can have the 
right to inflict it, nor any aggregation of mortals. 

This is a hard saying, but I will stand by it. 
There were criminals of all kinds in Atlanta with 
whom I was brought into contact. One had 
grown rich by organizing a system of " white 
slavery " on a large scale. He dealt in woman's 
dishonor and turned it into cash, and he saw noth- 
ing wrong in it. This man was advanced in years, 
he was incapable of regarding women in any other 
light than as merchandise, he was insensible to 
their misery, and laughed at their degradation. 
He was physically repulsive; his face and swollen 
body suggested a huge toad. It would be foolish 
to associate the idea of reform with such a crea- 
ture. I felt a nauseous disgust of him; he seemed 
on the lowest level of human nature. 

But, contemplating him during some months, I 
saw little touches of kindliness and good humor 
in him; he did not hate his fellows, nor wish them 
to hate him. If the other prisoners ostracized 
him or cursed him, he was painfully sensible of it, 
and even perplexed, and would try to win their 
favor. I perceived that he had always lived in a 
world of filth and sin, and knew no other. In that 
world, he had doubtless not done the best he might, 
but which of us can say he himself has done that? 



304 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

Had I been born and bred as he was, what would I 
be ? What right had I to call him unfit for my com- 
panionship? I had no right to do it, nor had any 
other man. At last I shook him by the hand and 
wished him well. 

There were men there who had committed merci- 
less robberies, cruel murders, heartless swindles, 
abominable depravities. I have felt greater tem- 
peramental aversion from many highly respectable 
persons than I did from them. Their crimes were 
one thing, they were another. Not that crime 
does not corrupt a man stain him of its color. 
But there is always another side to him, a place in 
him which it has not dominated. Given his con- 
ditions, we cannot affirm that he is not as good as 
we are that he is unfit to associate with us. 
And it behooves us always to bear it in mind that 
to affirm the contrary is an unpardonable sin 
against him of whom we affirm it; it works more 
evil in him than anything else we can do, and places 
us who repudiate him in a truly hideous posture. 
Shall we be more fastidious than God? 

All crime is hateful; but I came to the conclusion 
that there is only one crime which prompts us to 
hate the criminal as well as his crime itself. For 
this crime is one which originates in our heart; it 
is not forced upon us by need or passion or hered- 
ity. Therefore, it permeates every fiber of our 
being, every thought of our mind, every impulse of 
our soul; and we cannot say of it, this is one thing 



If Not Prisons What? 305 

and we are another. It is an unhuman crime; and 
yet there is no punishment for it among human 
laws; rather, it is regarded as a mark of superior- 
ity. The most respectable persons in the commun- 
ity are most apt to commit it. And it was upon 
the suggestion and initiative of this crime that 
penal imprisonment was invented, and is perpe- 
trated to this day. 

Christ condemned it; Christianity is based upon 
its repudiation; we call ourselves Christians; and 
yet it, is the characteristic crime of our civilization. 
The Law and the Prophets are against it; it defies 
every injunction of the Decalogue, for it takes the 
name of God in vain, it steals, murders, commits 
adultery, covets and bears false witness; but we 
clasp it to our bosoms, and actually persuade our- 
selves that it is the master key to the gates of 
Heaven. What is it? It is the thought in a 
man's heart that he is better, more meritorious, 
than his fellow. 

It is engendered, most often, by a successful out- 
ward morality conformity to the letter of the 
Commandments the whitening of the outside of 
the sepulcher. But the stench of the interior loath- 
someness oozes through. The only person un- 
aware of that stench is the man himself. There 
is but one cure for it what we call Regenera- 
tion; which makes us sensible of that deadly odor, 
and drives us freely and sincerely to detest our- 
selves in dust and ashes and bitter humiliation, to 



306 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

pity, succor and love our brethren, and to wrestle 
with the angel of the Lord for mercy.- But we 
prefer to seek salvation from evil in the building 
of prisons. 

Now, this crime may survive even in prisons ; but 
it is rarer there than in any other aggregation of 
human beings. Therefore, there is a wonderful 
sweetness in the prison atmosphere. It is a 
sweetness which is perceived amid all the dreari- 
ness, stagnation and outrage, and it rises above 
the vapors of physical crime, for it is a spiritual 
sweetness. There men are locked in their cells, 
but the whited sepulcher is shattered, and its sorry 
contents are purified by the pure light of humilia- 
tion, confession and helplessness; there are no 
hypocrites there, no masks, no holier-than-thou 
paraders. Their crimes have been proclaimed, 
and branded upon their backs; pretenses are at an 
end for them. It was wonderful to look into a 
man's face and see no disguise there. " I am 
guilty here I am ! " This experience took the 
savor out of ordinary worldly society for me. I 
go here and there, and everywhere there is mas- 
querading the weaving of a thin deception 
which does not deceive. We were sincere and 
humble in prison; but that is a result which the 
builders of prisons hardly foresaw. 

There was one more step toward compromise 
to take the prisoner out of his cell and send 
him outdoors without guards or precautions, noth- 



If Not Prisons What? 307 

ing but his promise that he would return when 
the work to which he was assigned was done. 

I read the other day an agreeable account of 
this " honor system." The men were employed 
on road making chiefly, enjoyed the benefit of free 
air and the outdoor scene, and kept order and 
faith among themselves. But the prison walls 
were still around them, though unseen. They 
were told that any attempt to escape would be 
punished by deprivation thenceforth of all liber- 
ties any attempt ! and if the escape were suc- 
cessful, the fugitive would know that the chances 
of recapture were a thousand against one. More- 
over, it was laid down that the escape or attempt 
of any member of the gang would react upon the 
liberties of all. 

This made the men guards over one another; it 
was not honor but self-preservation that was relied 
on. And in any event, there was the prison at last ; 
the chain might be lengthened to hundreds of miles, 
but it held them still. They were convicts ; when 
their terms were up, they would be jail birds. So- 
ciety had set them apart from itself; they were a 
contamination. " You are not fit to mingle with 
us on an equal footing." Society might conde- 
scend to them, be friendly and helpful to them, 
but admit them of its own flesh and blood ? 
well, not quite that! "We forgive you, but on 
sufferance; it is really a great concession; you 
must show your gratitude by good works." 



308 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

Oh, the Pharisees ! the taint of it will not come 
out so easily; and until it does come out, to the 
last filthy trace of it, prisons will continue to be 
prisons, and compromises will be vain. 

I repeat the evil of prisons is the imprison- 
ment. You must not deprive a man of his liberty. 
His liberty is his life. He may, and probably he 
will, use his liberty to the endangering of your 
property or comfort; but has your own career been 
wholly free from infringement upon the rights of 
your neighbor? If you send him to prison, you 
ought to link arms with him and go there, too. 
You have riot been convicted by a court, but your 
own secret self-knowledge convicts you. When 
the prison doors close upon you, you will discover 
that you have suffered an injustice that you are 
the victim of a blind stupidity. Not in this way 
can you be reformed. All genuine reformation 
must proceed from within you it cannot be com- 
pelled by locks and bars; freedom is essential to it. 
Locks and bars arouse only the impulse to break 
through them, and this primal and righteous im- 
pulse leaves you no leisure to think of relieving 
your soul from stains of guilt. 

The only imprisonment to which a man can 
properly be subjected is that imprisonment of 
good in him which evil-doing operates automat- 
ically and spontaneously; any outside meddling 
with that operation hinders, confuses, or defeats it. 
Crime weakens and shackles you; to put shackles 



If Not Prisons What? 309 

on the body is no way to remove shackles from 
the spirit. It is the gross blunder of a brutal 
and immature era, but we have continued it down 
to the present day. Jail is still the remedy. 

The newspapers the other day told of a man who 
had been sentenced to forty years in jail for an 
assault. A woman, hearing the verdict, said, 
"Well, that's better than nothing; but he ought 
to have got life ! " We are told in the Bible that 
we must not let the sun go down upon our wrath. 
The wrath of this lady could not be appeased with 
forty years. Think of what that culprit will be 
after forty years in jail. Assuming for the sake 
of argument the extreme absurdity that he is alive 
by that time, picture to yourself a fellow creature 
of his and a woman saying, " I won't for- 
give you yet." I pity her more than I do him, 
whose troubles in this world will probably soon be 
over. But when her time comes, with what face, 
on what plea, shall she ask forgiveness? 

But if there are to be no prisons, what shall we 
do to be saved from crime? 

I cannot for my part imagine any hard and fast 
plan being laid down in advance. But it would 
seem reasonable, to begin with, to free ourselves 
from the social crime of claiming superiority to 
our brethren. Having removed that beam from 
our eyes, we may see more clearly how to abate 
the motes in the criminal's. If we can bring our- 
selves to regard prisoners and jail birds as inferior 



310 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

to ourselves only in good fortune, which has kept 
us out of jail and put them in, we may find our- 
selves on the road to remedying their lapses from 
moral virtues. 

The majority of prison crimes are against prop- 
erty, and are motived by want and poverty. If 
the man had opportunity to work for his living, 
he would as a rule abstain from stealing. Other 
crimes are committed in passion; but such crimi- 
nals need education and training in self-control, and 
(often) removal of the provocations which set 
their passions afire. Many other crimes, and al- 
most all vices, are due to physical or mental dis- 
ease, or to actual insanity. It is the doctor and 
not the jailer who should seek the cure of these. 

But there are also some persons, chiefly brought 
up or brought down in our cities, who practise 
crimes, apparently, for sheer love of evil. These 
gunmen gangs are the most depraved and malig- 
nant members of the community; they will not 
work, and they rob and murder not from want or 
passion, but because the suffering of their victims 
gives them pleasure and ministers to their pride 
and self-esteem. Most of these gangs, as we 
have too much reason to believe, stand in with the 
police, giving them a percentage of their plunder, 
and getting protection from them for their mis- 
deeds. 

These creatures, as I have already suggested, 
are the distillation of the various evils in our cities 



If Not Prisons What? 311 

which society has failed frankly to face, or genu- 
inely to attempt to lessen. They are not responsi- 
ble for their existence, and, as they indicate a gen- 
eral condition, it can do no good to kill them or 
otherwise put them out of the way; others would 
take their place. They are not insane in the com- 
mon sense, but they are the product of insane social 
circumstances, responsibility for which rests on us. 
They must be taken in hand individually, by work- 
ers self-consecrated to that duty, and deterred 
from doing evil, and showed the value of doing 
good. One might work a lifetime with some of 
them, and have little to show for it in the end; but 
it took a long time to build the pyramids and the 
Panama Canal, and to advance from the dugout of 
the savage to the Mauretania. It is work better 
worth doing than any of these. 

Taking the situation by long and large, society 
must cease to be a sham and become truly social. 
The thing seems inconceivable, and still less prac- 
ticable; but it is not. Nor has history failed to 
admonish us that it has sometimes been the most 
difficult and improbable things which have been 
nevertheless accomplished; as if their very diffi- 
culty, and the labor and self-sacrifice involved in 
doing them, were themselves a stimulus. 

Europe, a handful of centuries ago, at the be- 
hest of a fanatical priest or two, forsook all else 
and spent a generation in journeying to Palestine 
and trying to get a certain city from the Turks. 



312 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

The city was worth nothing to Europe; it was an 
idea that set them crusading. Nothing else 
seemed so unpractical and feeble as the gospel of 
Christ; but it crumbled the Roman Empire into 
dust, and has kept the world guessing and maneu- 
vering ever since never more than to-day. On 
the other hand, if you propose an easy job, some- 
thing that can be done with one hand tied behind 
you, and your attention is diverted, it is apt to 
remain undone. Nobody can get up an interest in 
it. But talk of an expedition to the South Pole, 
or a flight round the earth in a biplane, with cer- 
tainty of appalling hardships and all the odds in 
favor of death, and you are mobbed with volun- 
teers. Human nature likes to test its thews and 
sinews. 

Perhaps, however, nothing else was ever so 
difficult as to turn from our flesh pots, our dinners 
and tangos, our summer resorts and winter resorts, 
our business and idleness, and undertake to substi- 
tute for prisons our personal care and help for 
criminals to remove the causes which led them 
to crime, to convince them of our good faith and 
good will, and to disabuse them of their suspicion 
that we distrust them, condescend to them, and 
despise them. For this prodigal brother of ours 
has become a very unsightly and unattractive ob- 
ject during these thousands of years of his sojourn 
among the pigsties and corn husks. He does not 
speak in our language or observe our manners or 



If Not Prisons What 4 ? 313 

contemplate our ideals, or care for our refinements. 
We shall have to read again the fairy stories where 
the prince has been changed by evil enchantment 
into some uncouth and repulsive monster, but was 
redeemed to human form by sympathy. The evil 
spell was of our working, and it behooves us to 
overcome it. No one else can. 

We must abolish the title of criminal as ap- 
plied to any class or individuals of our race in dis- 
tinction from others, and use those of unfortunates 
or scapegoats instead. They are our victims, and 
our salvation depends upon our making good to 
them the evil we have done them. It will not 
suffice to delegate the job to money, or to persons 
chosen for that purpose; we must do it ourselves 
make it one of the main occupations of our 
lives. Riches and culture are fine things, but mak- 
ing good out of evil is better. Its rewards may 
not be so immediate or so visible, but they are real 
and permanent. 

But I do not think morality will be enough to 
energize the effort; morality should always be the 
incident and consequence of religious feeling, not 
an aim in itself. As soon as it becomes an aim 
in itself, it leads to self-righteousness, and para- 
lyzes human love in its marrow. And it is love, 
far more than wisdom, that is needed here. Love 
God and keep His commandments; unless you 
first love Him, His commandments will be left 
undone, or done only in the letter, which is the 



314 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

worst form of not doing. But the way to love 
God is to love the neighbor, and the neighbor is 
the criminal. 

Who shall have the immortal credit of abolish- 
ing prisons ourselves, or our posterity? It will 
surely be done by our posterity if not by ourselves. 



APPENDIX 

BUBONIC PLAGUE cannot be reformed; it is bad 
intrinsically and must be extirpated. Born in 
Asiatic filth, ignorance and barbarism, it now menaces 
modern civilization. While it killed millions in India or 
China only, we endured it, but when we hear it at our 
own door we turn and listen. The instinct of self- 
preservation, older and often more urgent than Christian- 
ity, says, " Destroy it or it will destroy you ! " 

We send our scientific martyrs to the front, who per- 
ish in the effort to solve the deadly riddle. We would 
pour out billions of money in the fight if need come. 
Rich men will spend all they possess rather than die, and 
see those they love die of it. Nations will do the same. 
Compromises are not considered; no one talks of reform- 
ing the Black Death. Unless it be jettisoned from the 
Ship of Civilization, progress and enlightenment go by 
the board. 

And yet the disease is but physical attacks the body 
only. It does not touch the immortal spirit. It has not 
rooted itself in the entrails of our social economy and 
order. It does not undermine our common humanity, or 
bankrupt human charity and infect it with indifference, 
suspicion or mutual hostility. It does not prompt law 
and justice to play the roles of persecution and oppres- 
sion. It does not arrogate to itself the right to judge 
between man and his brother man, protecting the one and 



316 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

damning the other. It does not authorize us to say of 
the victim of sickness or circumstance, " Throw him to 
the lions! " and to affirm of his torture and death, " Serves 
him right ! " Compared with such a plague as that, the 
Black Death would appear benign. 

Penal imprisonment is an institution of old date, born 
of barbarism and ignorance, nurtured in filth and dark- 
ness, and cruelly administered. It began with the domin- 
ion of the strong over the weak, and when the former 
was recognized as the community, it was called the au- 
thority of good over evil. Man took the reins of govern- 
ment from the hands of the Almighty, and amended the 
Ten Commandments with statute law. 

Evil is to prefer the good of self before good of the 
neighbor; crime is to act in accordance with that prefer- 
ence. Every son of Adam is born to evil, and society is 
but his multiplication; but society could exist only by the 
compromise that the hostility of man against neighbor 
should mask itself as mutual forbearance. Impossible 
that every one should possess every thing; there- 
fore dissimulate your greed and divide. But certain per- 
sons, missing their share either through non-conformity 
with the doctrine, or by force of circumstances, stuck to 
the old principle of each man for himself, and became 
" criminals." Their hand was against society, and soci- 
ety's against them. 

In eras before society became integrated, some of these 
non-conformists prevailed over such strength as could be 
mustered against them, and by hearty and forthright rob- 
beries and murders came to be leaders and rulers of men 
earls, barons, kings. The aristocracy of modern 
Europe is descended from such stout rebels. They be- 
came reconciled with, and organized, society, and aided it 



Appendix 317 

in war against the weaker of their own sort; and it was 
they who devised prisons for such captives as it might be 
inexpedient to kill outright. 

All this did not alter the truth that all men are alike 
evil, and that such as are not also criminals, forbear 
at the outset at least from motives of enlightened sel- 
fishness. But in course of time, even enforced good be- 
havior breeds good intent, and " good " people. For 
God rules us through our very sins, and will lead us, 
(with our passive cooperation) to religion and regenera- 
tion in the end. 

But the segregation of a criminal class is manifestly 
human, not Divine; economic, not moral; illusory, not 
real. Consequently, pains and penalties inflicted by men 
upon other men, by society upon individuals, by the com- 
munity upon " criminals," have no warrant of Divine 
authority, but only of superior numbers or physical 
strength. The only proper punishment for crime is the 
criminal's conscience, and if he have none available, he is 
liable to the natural contingency that violence breeds vio- 
lence, and may get him in the long run though it often 
happens that, measured by mortal standards, the run is 
not long enough for us to see the finish. We may con- 
sole ourselves with the reflection that a finish, some- 
where, there will be. 

Meanwhile, it is for persons of intelligence and good 
will to consider whether, aside from physical penalties or 
jailing, we possess means for inducing criminals to ab- 
stain from crime. Let us leave abstract arguments and 
come to facts. 

My license to speak in the premises is due to my being 
an ex-convict, sentenced to Atlanta Penitentiary for a 
year and a day, but recently released on " good time." I 



318 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

shall first give you a notion of what jail is, and of what 
is done and suffered there; then consider -what has 
hitherto been done to alleviate prison conditions and 
abuses; and end with inquiring whether these measures, 
actively prosecuted, will prove adequate to the need, or 
whether something else and more is demanded. If so 
what? 

Purgatory is usually understood to be as its etymology 
indicates a place where persons encumbered with evil 
accretions may have them purged out of them, or stripped 
off from them, and so be fitted for the purity and inno- 
cence of Heaven. It is therefore a beneficent institu- 
tion. Hell, on the other hand, was the inheritance of 
those whose evil is ingrowing and cannot be removed 
a place where they may live out their diabolical or 
satanic natures and be punished and tortured by those of 
like nature with themselves. 

Our prisons were, in the beginning, frankly hellish in 
their object; men who had incurred personal or society 
hostility were put in them to be tormented from motives 
of hate and revenge. But during the last few genera- 
tions the humanitarian idea has come into being and has 
not only ameliorated prison conditions in some prisons 
and to some extent, but has caused prisons in general to 
cease being frank and to become hypocritical to pre- 
tend that they are purgatories, aiming not at revenge but 
at reform. This pretense has been so industriously and 
sagaciously put forward that ninety-nine outsiders out of 
a hundred are misled by it, and believe that prisons are 
not, still, administered for the destruction of their in- 
mates, physical, mental and moral, with such circum- 
stances of cruelty and brutality as happen to suit the 
humor of the arbitrary and irresponsible guards and war- 



Appendix 319 

dens; but that they are uniformly conducted with an eye 
to wooing away prisoners from sin and crime, and per- 
suading them of the beauty and policy of honesty, gentle- 
ness and goodness. In fact it is probable that almost 
everybody believes this, except the wardens and guards, 
and the prisoners themselves and a few Thomas Mott 
Osbornes and other prison workers who have had an ama- 
teur peep inside the walls and caught a fleeting glimpse 
of a horror or two before the discreet managers could get 
the door shut. 

Not only so, but we read indignant articles in our 
morning paper about the coddling of criminals ; and witty 
writers will have it that prisons are gentlemen's clubs 
where all the comforts of refined life are combined with 
a voluptuous idleness, or with only work enough to avert 
ennui. Criminals are depicted as waiting in cues at the 
gates of prisons for admission, like the public at the doors 
of a popular theater; though at the same time in another 
column, you may find the statement that, in view of 
modern legal technicalities, it has become almost impos- 
sible to get a man into jail. According to the logic of 
the witty writers, this near-impossibility should be more 
deplored by the technicality-inhibited criminals than by 
anybody else. 

Prisons are not purgatories, nor gentlemen's clubs ; they 
are just as much hell as they ever were, and as their man- 
agers can make them. Apart from any special leniency 
of local conditions, prisons are hell because they are pris- 
ons because you are confined there and cannot get out ; 
because you are a slave and have no redress ; because your 
manhood is degraded; because despotic power is entrusted 
to the men who handle you, though they are never any 
better than you are, and are usually much worse, and re- 



320 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

gard you as an asset to make profit from, a thing to be 
driven and insulted to the last extremity and i>eyond it, 
and not as a human being. Prisons are hell because con- 
victs are punished for trivial and whimsical reasons as 
much as for serious ones; and whether or not the punish- 
ment involve actual physical torture, the insolence, dis- 
grace and injustice of it remain. Prisons are hell in- 
trinsically, and always will be; and whoever doubts it 
has only to commit a crime and be sent to prison; that is 
the end of doubts. 

Let every judge, attorney general, district attorney, 
and juryman at a trial spend a bona fide term in jail, and 
there would be no more convictions prisons would end. 
Every convict and ex-convict knows that, and eternity 
will be too short to obliterate the knowledge in him. 

The unctuous plausibility of the pretense that prisons 
are beneficent purgatories and not hells renders it the 
more sickening. Life is a God-given discipline for men, 
and at best a severe one; but if we believe in God, we 
know it is given in love, for loving ends. All mortal 
life is an imprisonment; the laws of it are essential and 
natural, and breaking them involves essential and nat- 
ural penalties. God deputed this regimen of love to 
parents, and to those who deal with their fellow crea- 
tures from impulses of parental or brotherly love; but 
He never licensed any man to punish another from re- 
venge or hate, or in mere indifference. He licensed no 
man to do it, nor any community or nation. And who- 
ever does it, serves not God but the devil; and if any 
crime be unpardonable, it is that, because it is not essen- 
tial or natural, but an usurpation against nature, and 
breeds not reform but more evil. 

Prison officials, in their treatment of prisoners, are not 



Appendix 32! 

actuated by love, but by indifference to suffering, or by 
animosity and brutality, or by desire of profit, and there- 
fore their work is impious and wicked. And the longer 
they hold their office, the more hardened do they become 
to the spectacle of suffering and outrage; the more heed- 
less of justice and mercy do they grow. They grow to 
disbelieve in any human truth and goodness; all men are 
to them criminals actual or potential; breathing and 
dwelling amidst crime, it enters into their own blood and 
temper. They will have their debt to pay; but neither 
may those escape who ignorantly or carelessly appointed 
them to office and hold them there the Government, 
and the nation which creates Government as its repre- 
sentative. Ignorance does not excuse; knowledge on 
these subjects is a sacred duty. Man cannot break the 
bonds of his brotherhood with man ; the blood shed will 
be required of him, and the usury of misery and tears. 

" Throw him to the lions ! serve him right ! " Most 
of us have joined in that barbarous cry upon occasion. 
But some of us have sickened at the slaughter, and are 
for paring the lions' claws, or at least exhorting them to 
roar less savagely, and to devour their prey in secret. 
But the lions, with their attendant hyenas and jackals, 
have so long been accepted as indispensable to the order 
and majesty of the State, that -no one likes to stand up to 
his God-given intuitions, and demand the abolition of the 
whole prison circus. We hardly realize that the harm 
criminals do society cannot equal the harm that society 
does to itself by its handling of them and attitude toward 
them. The circus must go on, of course; but let us 
ameliorate its coarser features! 

Let us make our prisons hygienic larger cells, 
drainage, air, exercise; let us select nice, kindly persons 



322 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

for guards and wardens; let us give the convicts useful 
industrial occupation, which will not only keep them 
happy and sane, but pay the cost of their keep to a ten- 
der-hearted but economic state; let us even be very ven- 
turesome, and with reasonable precautions put the 
men on their honor, suffer them to run out a little way 
and labor in the free sunshine, upon their promising to 
remember that they are not really free, and to return at 
night to their cages. And after they have served their 
terms, and the souls within them are moribund or dead, 
let us get or solicit jobs for them, and at all events keep 
a sentimental eye on them for a while. All this only 
let us keep our prisons! For think what would happen 
if those terrible creatures were let loose upon us, to keep 
on murdering and robbing us with impunity! Remem- 
ber that they are a class apart, unlike ourselves, whose 
perverted nature, though it may be lulled by gentleness 
and tact, can never become truly human. 

No: the Laodicean spirit will not serve! I do not 
ridicule or belittle the efforts of generous and genial men 
and women who give their spare time, or their whole 
time, to bettering the plight of convicts. But the dia- 
bolical spirit of the prisons sneers at them, and sits undis- 
turbed. Let air and sunshine come to outer courts and 
clean-swept cells; the star-chambers and the secret dun- 
geons remain. Let the outraged creatures out, to stray 
to the extent of their honor-tether; they are slaves and 
prisoners still. There were compassionate reformers in 
Ancient Egypt, who tried to make the lot of the captive 
Israelites easier; but the heart of Pharaoh was hardened, 
and God Himself must intervene before he would let 
the people go. Nor does it help that the slaves them- 
selves are grateful for hard-won privileges, and that we 



Appendix 323 

read urbane descriptions of smiling and rosy felons work- 
ing on state roads in " Don't Worry " camps. Is it 
ground for congratulation that the very victims of the 
specious pretense of the eternal right and necessity of 
prisons should have succumbed to that delusion? Does 
it not prove a need yet more urgent to be up and at 
them? Is it not humiliating to know that men, our 
brothers, partakers of our common nature, can be so 
abased as to kiss the rod, and joke about their fetters, 
and accept as favor what none is entitled to deny them? 
Prisons are hell we come back to that ; and they are 
not and cannot be made purgatories. Men competent to 
make them purgatories are not to be had at Government 
prices; no duties more onerous than those of a fit con- 
scientious warden exist under the state; and how can we 
look for such a man at a four or five thousand dollar 
salary? Twenty-five or even fifty thousand would be 
moderate, and the men who are worth that are in some 
other business. The foremost citizens of the nation 
w r ould not be too good for the job, and we content our- 
selves with ward heelers and rough-necks, who undertake 
it not for the salary, but for the graft that goes with it 
and exceeds it. Politics and graft sit in the warden's 
office, and walk the ranges in guards' uniform, and crush 
the manhood out of our brothers for money, and out of 
sheer wanton inhumanity. Of all the inmates of the jail, 
these men are the veritable and incorrigible and unpar- 
donable criminals; for they were not driven to crime by 
passion, hunger, drink or ignorance, they have not been 
reduced to the state of desperate pariahs, outcasts and 
scapegoats of the race, but they willingly embrace the 
function entrusted to them the Government license to 
steal, bully, torture and murder with a grotesque sane- 



324 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

timonious leer for the public, and for the convicts 
what! The regimen of hell! 

This writer's statements seem a trifle emphatic, do they 
not? May we not surmise that they are motived by 
some personal grudge? have we not heard an old adage 
" No thief e'er felt the halter draw with good opinion 
of the law ? " Would it not be prudent to take all this 
with a grain of salt? Shall we be driven to rash meas- 
ures by the objurgations of an ex-convict? 

Of the right or wrong of my conviction and sentence 
I am not to speak here, nor do they specially interest me 
now, except as illustrations of the working of the ma- 
chine. But personal grudge against officials of my prison 
I have none. I was treated with consideration and 
lenity. I came out in better condition upon the whole 
than I went in, both of body and spirit, though nothing 
would have been easier than to murder me under the 
forms of routine prison discipline. What was the reason 
of this? I was never informed; I might guess at it, but 
I don't know. Nevertheless, the sweetness and light of 
the prison dispensation as regarded myself did not blind 
my eyes or stop my ears to what was being done to others, 
not elected to dreams thus beautiful. I saw men beside 
whom I sat at meat or labored in the vineyard, fading 
and failing day by day ; I saw some of them die of broken 
hearts or broken bodies; I heard their stories and was 
certified of their truth; I saw the cart rattle out of the 
gate with the pine box containing the body of the man 
who could only thus find freedom; I visited the graves 
of those who had been needlessly and sometimes wan- 
tonly slain.. I could not ignore these things because I 
myself escaped them. After a few months of dur- 



Appendix 325 

ance, I went forth free, leaving behind me men as good 
as I or better, sentenced to serve years, lifetimes, under 
treatment which I cannot imagine myself as surviving at 
all. My grudge is deep, but no personal one. 

I shall not at present discuss Government measures 
of so-called mitigation suspended sentence, parole, in- 
determinate sentence. In the intention of their origi- 
nators they may have appeared beneficent; in practise, 
they proved sinister and abominable means to cruelty and 
despotism. There can be no compromises with hell. 

But can I pretend to solve the age-long problem of the 
right handling of crime in the community? I am not 
wiser than my fellows, but I have felt and known at 
first hand more of certain grievous wrongs than most of 
them have, and even those who have known and felt may 
not possess the opportunity or facility to speak that I 
have. I must say what is in me, and leave to the col- 
lective judgment of the nation, and to the further teach- 
ing of time, what shall be changed, abolished, and done. 

One thing seems plain there must be an act of faith. 
Worldly wisdom and enlightened selfishness have been 
tried out thoroughly and are thoroughly discredited. 
Their proposal was first to cure crime, and only after 
that was done, to abolish prisons. But it turns out that 
prisons generate, teach, perpetuate and inflame crime; 
never extirpate it, though they often deter specific per- 
sons from continuing a criminal career by either killing 
them outright, or destroying in them their effective spir- 
itual manhood. Therefore the selfishly enlightened an3 
worldly-wise shake their heads and declare that crime in 
criminals is ineradicable. If medicine for crime be futile, 
save as a temporary physical preventive, all that is left to 



326 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

us is to continue it as a preventive, while admitting its 
impotence as a cure. Protection of society is the para- 
mount consideration. 

Yes: but is society protected by prisons? John Jones 
has been jailed for burglary, it is true; but straightway 
Tom Brown, Jem Smith and Reginald Montmorency 
start in as train-robber, murderer and confidence man. 
We have sown the dragon's tooth, and reap three for one. 
Lynch your negro, and before the smell of roast flesh is 
out of the air, several fresh cases of rape are reported. 
But there is no visible connection between alleged cause 
and effect it just happens so. Yes, but if it does hap- 
pen almost invariably, we cannot avoid the suspicion that 
a connection, even though invisible to the outward eye, 
there must be. 

Moreover, on what grounds does society claim pro- 
tection against evils for which its own constitution and 
administration are responsible? The greatest happiness 
of the greatest number ? Are we so happy, then ? The 
happy man has been sought for long, but the seekers still 
delay to return. To what end shall we cut the cancer 
out of the body politic, if it sprout again in a more vital 
spot? If we could only reach the cancer germ! But 
the germ is not found by the knife. There are more 
criminals than there ever have been heretofore. The 
jails are over-crowded; we must either build new ones, 
or transform those we have into castles of refuge to 
which good people may fly to escape the criminal nations 
outside; there will be no over-crowding then! 

Let worldly wisdom and enlightened selfishness retire, 
and listen for a while to believers fanatics even. An 
act of faith: that is to say, first abolish jails, and then 



Appendix 327 

see what can be done with criminals! It is vain to beat 
about the bush; we must face the alternative. The syl- 
logism runs thus: criminality is incompatible with true 
civilization with a normal and secure society. Jails 
are a crime; society makes and warrants jails; therefore 
society is criminal. And the abolition of jails re- 
pudiation both of the principle and of the concrete fact 
is the only way to social redemption. 

The one escape from this conclusion is, of course, 
denial that jails are a crime. I will not further contest 
that point, but only repeat: Let the deniers and doubters 
try a year behind the bars, themselves, and then register 
their revised opinion. 

But, obviously, though jails are a crime, they are not 
the only crime; there are also the specific crimes of indi- 
vidual malefactors ; and it seems inevitable that by reliev- 
ing these of prison restraints, we must increase the 
prevalence of crime in the community, however much we 
might be absolving the community itself from its char- 
acteristic crime of jails. Is there any answer to that? 

I am not logically constrained to make any, because if 
jails are a crime they should be abolished, let the conse- 
quences be what they may. But I will suggest two con- 
siderations. Individual crimes are the outcome either of 
a pathological condition in the agent, or of conditions in 
his nurture and environment which are due to social neg- 
ligence or hardness of heart. These conditions tempted 
him beyond his power of resistance, or reduced him to 
desperation; in other words, no sane and normal man 
commits crimes for the fun of it, and as not he but society 
created the conditions, the latter must shoulder its part, 
at least, of the blame. And this implies that it should 



328 The Subterranean Brotherhood 

devote itself to so improving these evil conditions as to 
give the criminal a fair chance. 

That is easily written, but it involves nothing less than 
a radical readjustment of our whole attitude toward life. 
It also brings me to my second suggestion that this 
should be accomplished. We must embark upon a great 
adventure the greatest, so far as I know, ever under- 
taken in this world. We must overcome the anti-human 
prejudice that there is a distinct criminal class; we must 
recognize the latent criminality in us all, and regard 
those in whom from latent it has become active as such 
men as we, but for fortunate circumstances, would have 
been. There is no other distinction between them and 
us. 

Can brotherly companionship and trust reform them? 
If all of us sincerely and practically united in trusting 
and companioning them, so sincerely as to convince 
them of the fact I would have small misgivings. But 
we can expect no universal revolution to kindness. 
Many of us, probably the vast majority, would fail to 
rise to the height of the occasion. Yet I can believe that 
many would achieve that faith and stanchness ; enough to 
make a beginning of success. And I have no doubt 
whatever that, so far as the kindness was credited by its 
objects, they would do their part. Few men that I or 
any one have known in jail have been incorrigibly wicked 
at heart. There are indeed incorrigibly wicked men, but 
they are at least as frequent outside as inside jails, be- 
cause the crime of wanton hatred and cruelty to others 
which is theirs, comes only accidentally if at all under 
the cognizance of our law. 

When jails are razed and their inmates let forth, they 
are not to be left to shift for themselves. They are to 



Appendix 329 

be taken heartily and unreservedly into the community, 
made a part of us, protected against want and against 
their sinister propensities, given work to do, taught how 
to work, compensated for it, and shown by constant ex- 
ample the wholesomeness and beauty of good and decent 
living. Will they rob and murder their hosts? Such 
calamities will no doubt occur here and there; there have 
been martyrs in all great causes, and will be in this. But 
blood so shed will not be wasted. And if the nation, or 
a considerable part of it, turns resolutely and persistently 
to its mighty task, it will not fail in the end. 

There is nothing original or startling about the Golden 
Rule as a proposition ; but it will seem to tear us to pieces 
when it is put in practise. But that will do us no harm ; 
we have been long enough compacted together in error 
and selfishness. The revolution will come; it is still for 
us to say whether it shall be outward and terrible, or spir- 
itual and benign. Penal imprisonment and all that it 
implies is not sane nor safe ; and the cry, To the lions 
serves him right ! belongs to the dark ages, and not to 
the future. Reprinted by kind permission from Hearst's 
Magazine for February, 1914. 



VAIL-BALLOU CO., B1NGHAMTON AND NEW YORK 



THE WALL 

The long, high wall that shuts out life 
That death-in-life holds in its coil 
Its height and reach cannot prevent 
The sky, nor check the immortal strife 
We wage with hungry Fate, nor spoil 
Our desperate hope, nor circumvent 
Dreams, that redeem our aimless toil! 

What Fear and Ignorance have built 

Shall pass, with Ignorance and Fear, 

Before the breath of Love; and men, 

Casting aside the mask of guilt 

That baffled, mocked and cursed them here, 

Shall know each other once again! 

And must we die, release so near! 



(Written in Atlanta Penitentiary, 
October, 1913.) 



